The Trump administration lost any benefit of the doubt with their judicial appointments when they outraged the legal establishment (eg American Bar Association) by frequently ignoring the most qualified candidates for judicial appointments in favor of ideologically Republican ones.
Neither you or are the Bar Association have any right to tell the president who is most qualified for a role he appoints. Maybe you don’t like it or it’s “wrong,” but the Bar Association is a bunch bureaucrats not an arbiter of platonic truth or good.
Obviously it's his prerogative to choose who he and the Senate want, but then nobody should be outraged when the impartiality of his appointed judges is questioned.
edit: I'm rate-limited so can't reply, so here's my reply below:
It's a matter of degrees. For example, when Biden made it clear that he was hiring Ketanji Brown Jackson in part because she was a progressive black woman, she still had a massive amount of relevant experience and professional reputation. There's the understanding that while she obviously has a political bias, she's still a good judge. She had worked in district court, appeals court, she'd even worked as a public defender. She had an exceptionally long list of cases and legal opinions she could point to for her experience.
Meanwhile, contrast to Amy Coney Barrett, who had never been a judge before Trump appointed her into the Court of Appeals as a fast-track to the Supreme Court. She'd never tried a case all the way to verdict. She'd never argued an appeal. Her background was purely in academia.
All judges are picked for their political bias, that's how it works. Democrats pick judges who are more left leaning, conservatives pick justices that are more right leaning. To pretend it's just one way is incorrect.
...and before Trump both Republicans and Democrats when picking their nominees would pick a candidate that leaned their way and that the the other side could agree was well qualified and experienced enough to do the job well even if they didn't like the candidates politics.
In October, the American Bar Association rated Barrett "well qualified" for the Supreme Court opening, its highest rating.[115] The ABA confines its evaluation to the qualities of "integrity, professional competence, and judicial temperament
The ABA rated her as well qualified. I'm doing to defer to them. I do understand your point that she had never had a judgeship before her appeals appointment in 2017, of which she served a little over 3 years in that position.
I think looking back at the alacrity with which she was appointed, the speed at which Roe was subsequently overturned, not to mention the stated rationale of the POTUS at the time, we can all be confident that the true reason for her appointment wasn't her qualifications as a jurist.
>we can all be confident that the true reason for her appointment wasn't her qualifications as a jurist.
Of course that's true. All judges are picked for their political bias. If you want to argue that she's unqualified, I refer you to the ABA assessment which disagrees.
My point is that discussing her qualifications is irrelevant. If she were there to be a judge, then her qualifications as a jurist might matter. But she's not there to be a judge, she's there to be a political operative. I know it, you know it, Senate Republicans know it, the plaintiffs pleading cases before her know it, and (most importantly) she knows it. So why the hell is anyone talking about her qualifications as a jurist? In her role on the Supreme Court, her only role that matters, she's a political operative, and she behaves as such. Accordingly, that's the only lens under which she should be analyzed. The ABA has nothing relevant to say about her.
Institutional ethics are a counter force to tyranny.
In a democracy a professional organization does have a right to check power as does every individual citizen.
Where do you think checks and balances come from? A two party state defeats a traditional notion of checks and balances. Our founding fathers warned against it.
