Just last week, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement. Immediately, Americans recalled President Biden’s campaign trail promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court and held him to it. Although his choice won’t be announced until late February, the media is already focusing on several key players: California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, D.C. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, and Federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson chief among them. But there’s been mutterings of another option: VPOTUS Kamala Harris.

It’s never been done before—but it can be done. Law scholars and the Constitution concur that a sitting VP may be elevated to the bench, so long as they vacate the Vice Presidency. All a Supreme Court Justice needs is a nomination from the President and a simple majority from the Senate. There’s no mention of age, degree, citizenship, or even profession. In fact, past Justices have included self-taught lawyer James F. Byrnes and (at the time) unlicensed Robert H. Jackson.

Granted, most Supreme Court Justices are middle-aged, hold law degrees, and have storied careers in law prior to the bench. Even taking into account these de facto standards, Harris is more than qualified. Since graduating from UC Hastings College of the Law in 1989, she has risen from deputy district attorney to district attorney to state Attorney General to state Senator (serving on the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Judiciary Committee, among others) to Vice President of the United States.

And so, if Biden can legally make the nomination, and Harris can conceivably win confirmation, the only remaining question is why they should.

First and foremost, this is about depoliticizing and securing the future impartiality of the court. Should Democrats lose their slim Senate majority in this year’s midterm elections—and between gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the classic backlash against the sitting party, they are fully expected to—a GOP-led Senate is unlikely to confirm a liberal or even a centrist nominee. In four short years, Trump appointed three new Supreme Court Justices, the most of any president since the Reagan era, and in doing so moved the court solidly to the right, with six of the nine current justices leaning conservative. As each of his picks are in their fifties, they could easily serve twenty more years of their lifetime appointments. Breyer’s retirement is calculated to avoid an even more skewed court by letting Biden capitalize on the current moment and get his pick confirmed.

A Harris appointment would make the most out of the opportunity by putting a Black woman on the Supreme Court for the first time in history and giving the seat to a known quantity.

A Harris appointment would make the most out of the opportunity by putting a Black woman on the Supreme Court for the first time in history and giving the seat to a known quantity. After all, it’s common knowledge that not every President’s appointee will actually be favorable to their agenda. But with a clear partisan divide (and not in his favor) among the current lineup, Biden needs his pick to be patently liberal to have any hope of having a balanced court once more.

Beyond that, a Justice Harris would also open up a VP slot in the government, breathing new life and momentum into an administration that’s fallen from a 53% approval rating this time last year to a paltry 41.7% in the present day. Part of that is due to Biden’s less-than-stellar track record in addressing public priorities: economic recovery, healthcare reform, student loan forgiveness, and so on. But in making one of his earlier campaign promises a reality, he can begin to turn that all around, emboldening longtime supporters and potentially even winning back disillusioned ones.

Kamala Harris will undoubtedly play a large role in the coming days—if not as a nominee herself, then as a key figure in the appointment process. After all, this is her wheelhouse: she’s questioned SCOTUS nominees as part of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she has a strong familiarity with current committee members and their aides, and she has insider knowledge of what exactly the Biden administration is aiming to achieve before midterms. And whether she’s up for the job or evaluating others for it, she is the best-qualified person in this administration to know exactly what it takes.

Seth Jacobson is the founder and principal of JCI Worldwide, a Los Angeles-based communications and research firm. He spent several years in the Carter and Clinton administrations in positions focused on economic development, foreign policy, and media relations. He is a frequent lecturer on policy and public affairs at Pepperdine University and UCLA.

Entertainer Whoopi Goldberg kicked off Black History Month by unleashing a racial firestorm. The ladies of “The View” have a history of incendiary comments and actions that would get people who were less famous and less politically liberal fired. In the cancel culture era, being progressive is the only thing that allows people involved with blackface scandals to remain gainfully employed.

Despite appropriating Jewish culture via a name change, Goldberg, the woman formerly known as Caryn Elaine Johnson, is not Jewish. Nevertheless, Goldberg decided it was appropriate to discuss the nuances of the Holocaust as an authority. Goldberg is neither a historian nor a professor; she is an entertainer. To put it plainly, celebrities who reference the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler or Nazis often have no idea what they are talking about. As former South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy pointed out to Harris Faulkner on “Outnumbered,” being famous is not the same thing as knowing things.

Goldberg stated that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race. Her “reasoning” was that since the Nazis and the Jews they murdered were both light-skinned, there was no racial component to the Holocaust. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the Holocaust knows that Goldberg’s comments were ignorant and offensive. Jews come in all colors. There are Black Jews, Hispanic Jews and Asian Jews among others. While most European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s were light-skinned, the Nazis did not consider them to be white. The Nazis viewed the Jews as an inferior race. The Holocaust was absolutely a case of one group of people using their perceived racial superiority and purity to murder people they labeled racially inferior.

Again, this is not Goldberg’s first racially charged incident. She laughed heartily as her then-boyfriend Ted Danson dressed up in blackface and used the n-word repeatedly in front of her at a 1993 Friar’s Club roast. Danson was given a free pass for his behavior in a comedic setting, and Goldberg escaped serious scrutiny for playing along. Goldberg has also defended her current co-host Joy Behar for dressing up in blackface. But somehow she has always managed to emerge with a free pass.

Goldberg did, however, receive pushback from her co-stars, Behar and Ana Navarro, who disagreed with her Holocaust comments and were unexpected voices of reason in a moment of severe historical revisionism.

Goldberg’s attempts to clean up her comments were disastrous. Even leftist late night host Stephen Colbert could not rescue Goldberg from herself. Her non-apology apology was comprised primarily of her regret that others were “misunderstanding” her comments. But in fact, her comments were understood perfectly and seen for exactly what they were: an example of bigotry and ignorance. Her comments were mindless and insensitive, and the public outcry in the wake of her remarks is evidence of this.

While it may be tempting to simply dismiss the co-hosts of “The View” as incapable of offering intelligent comments on social and historical events, this would be a mistake. Dismissing them essentially gives them a free pass and limits the extent to which they are responsible for their words. Goldberg is an adult who has learned about the Holocaust and should know better. Ignorance is no excuse.

ABC executives did suspend Goldberg for two weeks, a meaningless symbolic action that amounts to little more than a fortnight vacation. Terminating her employment entirely would be a more appropriate response. But that, too, would be a mistake.

Conservatives are not calling for Goldberg to be fired. Nor should they. They also are not calling for a boycott. Conservatives worship at the altar of free speech, and while Goldberg’s comments were not just offensive but also historically inaccurate, she has a right to express her beliefs.

Conservatives are not calling for Goldberg to be fired. Nor should they.

Goldberg later apologized again for her comments in a post on Twitter. Under normal conditions, that should put the matter to rest. Sadly, America is not living under normal conditions. Plenty of other people have been subjected to cancel culture, with leftists leading the charge. Progressives regularly ban words, tear down statues, and demand that people be fired for regrettable comments.

Just ask Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The freshman legislator from rural Georgia made idiotic comments about Jewish space lasers. She tearfully called up various Jewish groups to apologize. There was no mercy for her. She was stripped of her committee assignments. She is now a pariah in America who is politically radioactive.

Goldberg and Greene both made terrible comments that were offensive to Jews. Only Greene was deemed so evil that she had to be driven from the town square. Goldberg, on the other hand, will return to her public platform in two weeks having suffered very few consequences. Goldberg is on the political left while Greene is on the right. It would seem that is the only reason similar utterances are treated differently.

The truth is that neither Goldberg nor Greene are antisemites. Neither of these two women spoke out of deliberate malice. They both made bad verbal mistakes. They both apologized in a manner more clumsy than their original comments. They both dug a hole and kept digging.

We as Americans and creatures of God should offer both of these women a helping hand out of that dark hole. Forgiveness truly is divine. To smear either Goldberg or Greene as antisemites is wrong. Exploiting awful comments for political gain will stop when everyone stops keeping score and accepts that we are all part of one American family.

Most importantly, falsely labeling someone a bigot and taking away their financial livelihood detracts from and trivializes real bigotry from people like David Duke and Ilhan Omar. Duke and Omar remain steadfastly unapologetic for their lengthy history of antisemitic comments. Duke and Omar hate Jews. Shunning and rejecting them is perfectly appropriate.

But Goldberg and Greene are not Duke and Omar, and should be forgiven. Let us move forward by condemning all real bigotry without canceling people who say things that they regret.

Eric Golub is a comedian, author and retired stockbrokerage professional living in Los Angeles. His interests include football, politics, Judaism, the stock market, and Angela Lansbury’s “Murder, She Wrote.”