Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement this week (more accurately, someone leaked it months earlier than he intended). Not really surprised - everyone knows the Dems are almost certain to lose Congress in the mid-term elections, so their opportunity to put who they want in Breyer's seat expires this year.
The announcement gives the administration a welcome distraction from its string of policy disasters, foreign and domestic. It also gives Biden a chance to offer a sop to the cranky leftists - to whom he keeps bending the knee despite their supporting his rivals during the primaries, and whose aggressive antics and racial divisiveness are a substantial contributor to the expected electoral shellacking.
It's obvious that Biden would select someone who mirrors Breyer ideologically, i.e. a candidate that leans left. A like-kind exchange isn't going to alter the Court much (though I've already heard it argued that an overt partisan, being less likely to sway swing justices with nuance, would serve the Left poorly), so this isn't an earthshaking event. But, it's still about a person who will be on the Court for three decades, so it does matter.
Which is why Biden's already bungled the process.
He declared, proudly, that he would be nominating a black woman for Breyer's seat. In doing so, he's tainting whomever he picks, no matter how qualified, as a "diversity hire," a cloud that will linger over her head for a long time.
Biden could, instead, have promised "the best person for the job," interviewed a Benetton ad-compliant spectrum of candidates, and surprised-not-surprised us all with a black woman nominee. Same outcome, much better optics, and the cloud would be smaller.
"Best person" is, to some degree, a judgment call, so it is beyond doubt that there are "best person" candidates who also happen to be black women. A few names have been suggested (including Kamala Harris, whose nomination to the Court would be the most absurd moment of too-many-to-count in Biden's short tenure), and (barring the joke of him foisting Harris on us for the rest of my life expectancy) those names appear well-qualified (or at least well-pedigreed), and I'm sure that any of those judges will serve the Democrats' desires reasonably well.
But, it'd certainly serve whomever is ultimately confirmed as the first black woman on the Court if Biden didn't make her black-woman-ness a core component of her seating.
An unforced error, born of echo chambers and fealty to identity politics above all else.