Sherrilyn Ifill earned congressional backing for SCOTUS nod and served on Biden’s High Court reform commission
Howard Law professor Sherrilyn Ifill, who was floated as a possible Supreme Court pick for President Joe Biden, called Fox News host Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, an “eminently dangerous” “white supremacist.”
“This is someone who, you know, is known to be a white supremacist, known to be an extremist, whose platform, whose book, is basically about his opposition to the advancement of black officers to the top brass,” Ifill told MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Thursday. “There’s no evidence that this man has ever run anything. The fact that he is a veteran is simply insufficient.”
After serving in the Army, which included deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth was the executive director of Vets for Freedom from 2007 to 2010. He was also the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America from 2012 until 2015.
Hayes said Hegseth “would deny strenuously he’s a white supremacist.”
“So did Trump,” Ifill responded.
Ifill’s name was included in a 2022 Politico article listing Biden’s potential replacements for then-Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer after Breyer announced his retirement. After Biden pledged to nominate a black woman to the Court, Ifill, the former head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, received support from members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Biden eventually chose Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for the seat.
Biden also tapped Ifill for his Supreme Court Reform Commission, which in 2021 evaluated potential reforms for the Court, such as adding justices and introducing term limits. She serves as the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Esq., endowed chair in civil rights at Howard Law School.
“At this moment of democratic crisis in our country, we must return to the 14th amendment and its powerful and pragmatic conception of a post-Civil War America grounded in the values of equality, justice and a reimagined vision of citizenship,” Ifill said following her appointment to the chair. “That vision includes a clear-eyed confrontation with the stubborn persistence of white supremacy and its ongoing threat to the promise of our new country.”
Hayes during his interview with Ifill brought up a controversy surrounding Hegseth’s tattoos.
“He has tattoos that garnered the attention of essentially National Guard commanders when he was going to be sent on the mission to guard the 2020 inauguration of Joe Biden and was pulled from that, he says because he was identified as an extremist, in part because of those tattoos. He thinks it’s crazy,” Hayes said.
Hegseth has a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross—a large cross with four smaller crosses in the corners—and another of the words “Deus vult,” which is Latin for “God wills it.” Such tattoos are Christian symbols, with Jerusalem crosses being especially common among Catholics.
