Biden’s choice of Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court is no surprise. She has a very strong resume, and was always the frontrunner.
Jackson has the traditional Supreme Court credentials: Harvard, magna cum laude; Harvard Law, cum laude, and Harvard Law Review; clerked at the district, appeals, and Supreme Court levels; was in private practice with a high-profile D.C. law firm, and also government legal experience (as a federal public defender, and member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission). This is someone who was minted, trained, and groomed to sit on the Supreme Court.
She comes from a family of police officers (a brother and two uncles, one of whom was a chief of police). Yet, on a court typically populated by former prosecutors, she’ll bring a public defender’s perspective, and sentencing reform experience, to the Supreme Court’s bench. A significant portion of Supreme Court cases involve defendants’ rights. As a judge, she also has delved into “complex questions about executive power” (details in article here).
She’s also very smart, has unimpeachable integrity, and — importantly — believes in the rule of law.
There are no more important judges in the U.S. legal system, and not just because the Supreme Court has final say in U.S. legal matters. As MSNBC says (here), “The court is charged with deciding contentious, difficult issues that Americans can’t settle in any other dispute-resolution mechanism in our society … high-profile issues like abortion and voting rights, … defining criminal conduct, the rights of suspects … and how much power the federal government has.”
Moreover, “the court doesn’t have an army to enforce its decisions. It relies on the public’s willingness to abide by them. It only has the power to make and enforce its decisions because we are willing to give the court that authority.”
This plugs into the broader notion, increasingly fraught these days, that we’re a society in which ultimate power resides in the people, and government governs with the consent of the governed. The Supreme Court has power insofar as the people have confidence in its decisions, and legal decision at any level stand or fall on how well-reasoned they are. Courts should not be partisan bodies.
No senator should vote against Jackson because she’s a woman, or black; those aren’t valid arguments. Neither should they deny her confirmation on the grounds she’s “a liberal,” because if ideological leaning is a disqualifying factor, then you can say the same thing about every “conservative” justice on the Supreme Court. The fact is, there’s no good reason to vote against her confirmation, and a trainload of reasons to vote for it.
Nevertheless, most — if not all — Republican senators will vote “no.” When they do, that will be a judgment on them, not on her.
Related story: Only 16% of Republicans say “a Black female justice would be a good thing for the United States,” an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds (story here).
Photo: Judge Jackson (center, behind the dog) in 2019
