- A Fox News panel reacted strongly to news of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's plans to retire.
- The focus quickly settled on President Biden's promise to nominate a Black woman.
- Host Harris Faulkner said "what you're talking about is discrimination."
Minutes after news broke that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will be retiring, Harris Faulkner's show "Outnumbered" on Fox News quickly turned to outrage over President Joe Biden's campaign pledge to appoint a Black woman to the nation's highest court.
Jonathan Turley, a Fox News contributor and constitutional law professor at George Washington University, compared Biden's pledge to college admissions and tried to argue picking a Black woman would be unconstitutional under any other circumstances.
"And the irony is the Supreme Court just accepted two cases on the use of race preferences in college admissions," Turley, who was a pro-Trump impeachment witness, said over the phone. "And so this is obviously going to come up where the president's going to have to decide if he intends to fulfill a pledge that the court would never allow if he was actually admitting someone into a college."
Faulkner replied, "Jonathan Turley, what you're talking about is discrimination."
"And what we're about to see now is if the President of the United States would engage in that against a court who would say no to it otherwise, and that's an important thing," he continued. "Race is at the heart of just about everything we see from the left right now. It is so much in the nomenclature of politics that are most divisive in America right now, not bringing us together. Would this further divide?"
Earlier in the show, Fox Nation streaming host Tomi Lahren said she hopes Biden has "a better choice in mind" than a Black woman.
—Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 26, 2022
"We saw how well that worked out with Kamala Harris, but here's to hoping he has a better choice in mind for this position," Lahren said.
After asking if adding a Black woman to the bench — which would be a first in US history, with the only other woman of color to serve on the Supreme Court being Justice Sonya Sotomayor — could "further divide" the nation, Faulkner pivoted to speculation that Biden would nominate Vice President Kamala Harris.
—Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 26, 2022
Fox News did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.