So what are some takeaways from this?

The first and most important is that it is outrageous that Becerra, who is doing an important job very badly, is being kept at HHS in order to meet a diversity goal. He should be fired immediately and replaced with somebody competent, because running government well is more important than making the Congressional Hispanic Caucus happy.

The second is actually not that it is inherently irresponsible to pursue a cabinet that “looks like America.” Again, if an ethnic composition target was the only restriction on the formulation of a cabinet, it wouldn’t be hard at all to fill it with great, qualified hires. The problem is that there are lots of other non-qualification factors that already weigh into cabinet nominations: pleasing powerful members of the party, rewarding one’s political allies, picking people the president personally likes, whatever. If you want to dial up the diversity requirements, you need to dial those down.

That is, you tell the CHC it can have the Hispanic representation it wants in the cabinet, but not with a preference for CHC alumni. And you don’t use the HHS job to reward someone for being a good #resistance fighter in the courts; you fill it with someone who knows how to lead a large and complex health bureaucracy.