The US Senate was yesterday expected to confirm US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, securing her place as the first black woman on the high court and giving US President Joe Biden a bipartisan endorsement for his historic pick.
Three Republican senators have said they would support Jackson, who would replace US Justice Stephen Breyer when he retires this summer.
While the vote would be far from the overwhelming bipartisan confirmations for Breyer and other justices in decades past, it would still be a significant bipartisan accomplishment for Biden in the narrow 50-50 Senate after Republican senators aggressively worked to paint Jackson as too liberal and soft on crime.
Photo: AP
“It will be a joyous day,” US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said late on Wednesday as he announced the vote. “Joyous for the Senate, joyous for the Supreme Court, joyous for America.”
Jackson, a 51 year-old federal appeals court judge, would be just the third black justice, after Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and the sixth woman.
She would join two other women, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, on the liberal side of a 6-3 conservative court. With Justice Amy Coney Barrett sitting at the other end of the bench, four of the nine justices would be women for the first time in history.
After a bruising hearing in which Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee aggressively interrogated Jackson on her sentencing record, three Republican senators said they would support her.
The statements from US senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney all said the same thing — they might not always agree with Jackson, but they found her to be enormously well qualified for the job.
Collins and Murkowski decried the increasingly partisan confirmation process, which Collins called “broken,” and Murkowski called “corrosive” and “more detached from reality by the year.”
Biden, a veteran of a more bipartisan Senate, said from the beginning that he wanted support from both parties for his history-making nominee, and he invited Republicans to the White House as he made his decision.
It was an attempted reset from three brutal Supreme Court battles during former US president Donald Trump’s tenure, when Democrats vociferously opposed the nominees, and from the end of former US president Barack Obama’s, when Republicans blocked Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from receiving a vote.
Before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, Jackson said her life was shaped by her parents’ experiences with lawful racial segregation and civil rights laws that were enacted a decade before she was born.
With her parents and family sitting behind her, she told the panel that her “path was clearer” than theirs as a black American.
Jackson attended Harvard University, served as a public defender, worked at a private law firm and was appointed as a member of the US Sentencing Commission, in addition to her nine years on the federal bench.
“I have been a judge for nearly a decade now, and I take that responsibility and my duty to be independent very seriously,” Jackson said. “I decide cases from a neutral posture. I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor, consistent with my judicial oath.”
Once sworn in, Jackson would be the second youngest member of the court after Barrett, 50. She would join a court on which no one is yet 75, the first time that has happened in nearly 30 years.
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