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Rep. Glenn Grothman has occasionally generated headlines for unfortunate reasons. The Wisconsin Republican argued a couple of years ago, for example, that the District of Columbia doesn’t deserve statehood because it doesn’t have any local mining. Several years earlier, Grothman explained his opposition to equal-pay legislation by saying, “You could argue that money is more important for men.”
Around the same time, he reportedly criticized sex-ed classes because, as Grothman put it, some gay teachers “would like it if more kids became homosexuals.”
The Republican nevertheless keeps running for re-election, even after he broke his term-limits pledge, and folks in Wisconsin’s 6th congressional district keep sending him back to Capitol Hill. In fact, in the 2022 midterm elections cycle, he won 95% of the vote — because literally no local Democrat was willing to run against him.
With this in mind, Grothman apparently feels comfortable speaking his mind, even when he has ideas he probably ought to think twice before sharing. Consider the Republican’s comments yesterday about President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees.
“Apparently, his first two years, President Biden had appointed 97 federal judges. Of the 97 federal judges, I was expecting maybe 25 or 30 were white guys — because I know President Biden wasn’t heavy on appointing more white guys. Five of the 97 judges were white guys. Of those, two were gay. So [it’s] almost impossible for a white guy who’s not gay apparently to get appointed here.”
Just in case anyone thought Grothman might’ve been kidding, it’s clear from the clip that he was not. The GOP lawmaker — who, as a House member, doesn’t even vote on judicial nominees — apparently just isn’t happy about the White House and Senate Democrats adding greater diversity to the federal bench.
If his whining seemed at all familiar, the same Republican expressed concern in March that by diversifying the courts, Biden might be “actively discriminating against white heterosexual men.”
For what it’s worth, a Washington Post analysis noted today that white people “make up a higher percentage of the judiciary than the population.” Related data shows that white men currently hold 46% of the seats on the federal bench — and in case this isn’t obvious, white men do not constitute 46% of the U.S. population.
Just last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered floor remarks in which the New York Democrat boasted, “I am proud of the historic progress this Senate majority has made in advancing and confirming highly qualified, diverse judicial nominees to lifetime appointments to the bench — and you can be sure we are going to keep going.”
Evidently, that wasn’t the news a certain Wisconsin Republican wanted to hear.