American conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan wrote a column titled 'Are liberals anti-WASP' last week, in which he suggested that if Supreme Court justice nominee Elena Kagan is confirmed, there will be a disproportionately large number of Jews on the Supreme Court bench. In his column for World Net Daily, Buchanan lamented the fact that since 1965, no Democratic president has nominated a black Supreme Court justice, but that "if Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats."
Buchanan decried the lack of Protestants on the bench, saying that "If Kagan is confirmed, the Court will consist of three Jews and six Catholics (who represent not quite a fourth of the country), but not a single Protestant, though Protestants remain half the nation and our founding faith."
"Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, [Thurgood] Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan," Buchanan added, accusing the Democrats of neglecting to maintain diversity, and being clearly in favor of Jews.
The column elicited numerous angry responses. Anti-Defamation League Director Abe Foxman issued a statement saying that "Pat Buchanan is a recidivist anti-Semite who never misses an opportunity to show his fangs. His remarks about the Jewish background of Elena Kagan and the religious makeup of the Supreme Court are bigoted and unacceptable in a pluralistic society such as ours."
