Mother Jones -There’s no Supreme Court decision more widely celebrated than Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 ruling that abolished school segregation. But this month, when Neomi Rao appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, she refused to say whether she thought the case had been correctly decided.
Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) whether the court had made the right decision in Brown, Rao replied, “As a judicial nominee, I think it’s not appropriate for me to comment on the correctness of particular precedents.” Blumenthal asked her for a yes or no, but Rao would say only that Brown is “an incredibly important decision of the Supreme Court”—a dodge she twice repeated when pressed further.
In normal times, the moment might have been extraordinary. During the Trump administration, it’s par for the course. Rao is one of at least 10 Trump nominees to the federal courts in the past year who have refused to offer an opinion on Brown.
Until Trump took office, refusing to endorse Brown as a judicial nominee would have been unthinkable.
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