Published in The New York Times is an intriguing new piece, “Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor.” The article, as the title implies, promotes the view arrogated by Democrats — and blacks in particular — that Republicans are chauvinist for refusing Barack Obama another Supreme Court appointee.

Among those quoted in the Times is a black resident from South Carolina who said, “They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there. The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.” Another stated, “Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.” Similarly, adds yet another, “I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice.” And North Carolina Rep. G. K. Butterfield asserted, “It’s more than a political motive — it has a smell of racism. … [I]f this was any other president who was not African-American, it would not have been handled this way.”

The Times agrees, sympathetically writing: “After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout ‘You lie!’ at him from the House floor [he did lie, of course], some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories. … [A] growing chorus of black voices is complaining that such a refusal to even consider a Supreme Court nominee would never occur with a white president.”

The only explanation we can come up with is that their memory is borked. Note at the introduction the phrase “another Supreme Court nominee.” While Republicans fight against faux accusations of racism, both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were nominated by Obama and confirmed by the Senate. A Scalia successor would be Obama’s third pick to the nation’s highest court. Moreover, their confirmation votes (68-31 and 63-37, respectively) were higher than that of black Justice Clarence Thomas, who barely squeezed through after being nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1991. He took the bench after a 52-48 vote. Republicans could have played the race card, but the reality is that Thomas’ hurdle had to do with the fact that he, like Scalia, is a conservative stalwart. Democrats have sold their snake oil quite successfully when the only explanation all these folks can think of for opposing a president’s SCOTUS nominees is that he’s (half) black.