Joe Biden only needs 51 votes in the U.S. Senate for confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, his nominee for the Supreme Court. She will get the votes of all the Senate Democrats and likely several votes from Republicans. Nothing will change in the Supreme Court when she is sworn in to fill Breyer’s retirement vacancy. This is all a done deal.

Why, then, is Rep. Jim Clyburn going on a Sunday morning political show, as he did today, and attempting to strong-arm Republicans into voting in favor of Brown Jackson? He laid liberal rhetoric on thick during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. Clyburn is on the defense these days because he strongly lobbied Biden to choose U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs from South Carolina, his home state. Now he is trying to convince anyone who asks about the disappointment he may be feeling that his choice wasn’t selected that everything is fine. According to Clyburn, Republicans must vote for her because otherwise, they aren’t working for a more perfect union. For Democrats, a person’s race is everything, and by God, Republicans better prove they aren’t racists when they cast their votes.

“This is beyond politics,” Clyburn said in an interview with “Face the Nation.” “This is about the country, our pursuit of a more perfect union, and this is demonstrative of another step in that pursuit, and I would hope that all of my Republican friends would look upon it that way. Let’s have a debate, let’s talk to her about her rulings and about her philosophy. But in the final analysis, let’s have a strong, bipartisan support to demonstrate that both parties are still in pursuit of perfection.”

“We all have our personal preferences. We all have our reasonable biases. But in the final analysis, I think this is a good choice,” he said. “It was a choice that brings onto the court a background and some experiences that nobody else on the court will have. And I think when you look at not just her background in the family, life, but also her profession, she was a public defender. That adds a new perspective to the court.”

Here’s the thing – the nomination for a Supreme Court justice is always about politics. Clyburn, a longtime politician and right hand man for Speaker Pelosi, knows very well that this is a political move by Joe Biden. The timing of his announcement was chosen to be by the end of February and he met that deadline. He will deliver his first State of the Union address on March 1. He needs to be able to say he has nominated a black woman for the Supreme Court and kept his campaign promise. What he won’t say is that making such a promise was as payback for the support of black women voters, especially in South Carolina, without whom he would not have survived the Democrat primary and then win the presidency in 2020. Clyburn played kingmaker when he made an eleventh hour endorsement of Biden in the South Carolina primary and Biden is beholden to him. Clyburn will continue to call in his chips with Biden over the next three years.

Biden calculated that Brown Jackson will have an uneventful Senate confirmation, pointing to the fact that she has already been confirmed in the Senate for the U.S. Court of Appeals to the District of Columbia Circuit. She received the votes of three Republican senators then – Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, and Lisa Murkowski. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to predict that both Collins and Murkowski will vote for the nominee. Maybe Graham will, too, though he is still bitter how Democrats acted during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and he fully supported Childs, as did the other senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott.

Brown Jackson is a very traditional nominee. She’s Ivy League educated, having graduated from Harvard University and Harvard Law School. If “looking like America” and the calls for more diversity were real, Childs would have been chosen. She is outside of Washington and a graduate of public universities. Obviously she is able to reach both sides of the aisle, as support from both Graham and Scott shows. Childs offered consensus building skills, according to those who know her. Brown Jackson is a run-of-the-mill progressive. She is being called a “politician in robes” by the RNC. According to the RNC, Brown Jackson “repeatedly ruled against the Trump administration and struck down conservative policies, is a Democrat partisan having worked for Obama’s presidential campaign and donated to Obama, and has a record of defending terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay, and continued to advocate for these terrorists after going into private practice.”

She has the resume of a Supreme Court justice with the addition of her work as a public defender. While the left is busy having a “yasss Queen” moment, the Supreme Court has looked like America for quite some time. From Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas, there has been black representation on the Supreme Court. From Sandra Day O’Connor (a Republican Reagan nominee) to RBG, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Amy Coney Barrett, women justices have been seated on the Supreme Court. The obsession of Democrats to check identity boxes actually short-changes their picks because then they are labeled as affirmative action choices, fair or not. Biden announced he’d nominate a black woman who would become the first black woman to sit on the court as a sop to black voters. It is all about politics. Other presidents have specified that a woman would be chosen. However, to specifically make race a qualification takes it to a new level. It’s not a good direction to go to, especially for something as important as a Supreme Court nominee.

The hypocrisy of the left is apparent. Joe Biden did what he could to keep a Republican Hispanic nominee, Miguel Estrada, off the court. Biden didn’t want a Republican president to appoint a Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court. He did the same to Janice Rogers Brown when she was nominated by GW Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Biden and other Democrats filibustered her nomination.

The story begins in 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court. Brown was immediately hailed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. She was highly qualified, having served for seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — the first Black woman to do so. She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers, and grew up in rural Alabama during the dark days of segregation, when her family refused to enter restaurants or theaters with separate entrances for Black customers. She rose from poverty and put herself through college and UCLA law school as a working single mother. She was a self-made African American legal star. But she was an outspoken conservative — so Biden set out to destroy her.

The color of a nominee’s skin only matters to Biden and other hypocritical Democrats when it is to the advantage of their party. Black conservatives are ignored or blocked by Democrats. To say this nomination isn’t about politics is a statement worthy of being called out.