In a tweet on Friday, Joe Biden announced that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will be his nominee to the Supreme Court.
I’m proud to announce that I am nominating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court. Currently serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she is one of our nation’s brightest legal minds and will be an exceptional Justice.https://t.co/iePvhz1YaA pic.twitter.com/Nzqv2AtN8h
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 25, 2022
Jackson is a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — the court where the Constitution goes to die.
The president will officially name Brown Jackson as an associate justice in a press conference later today.
Ketanji Brown Jackson would be the first black female Supreme Court justice in history and her nomination fulfills a campaign promise made by Joe Biden to name a woman of color to the high court.
Republicans objected to Biden’s plan to consider only black females for the spot on the high court, but this is how the government is run in the modern age: all racial and gender boxes must be checked in order for the “best qualified” nominee to emerge.
Her most notable decisions on the district court included blocking the Trump administration’s attempts to fast-track deportations, cut short grants for teen pregnancy prevention and shield a former White House counsel from testifying before Congress about President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.
“Presidents are not kings,” she wrote in 2019, issuing a ruling that Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, had to obey a congressional subpoena seeking his testimony about Mr. Trump’s actions. “They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.”
Liberals wept with joy when that became public, but in fact, the same point had been made by a conservative justice, Warren Burger in 1973 — and made with more eloquence.
Jackson is as qualified for the high court as any recent justice — which isn’t saying much at all. She served as a judge on the federal district court, where Justice Stephen Breyer swore her in. “She sees things from different points of view, and she sees somebody else’s point of view and understands it,” he said at the time. Judge Jackson also served as a public defender, whereas most Supreme Court nominees are former prosecutors. We can expect the law to take second place to “social justice” with her on the bench.
She has also been twice confirmed by the Senate, including last year, when three Republicans voted yes in a 53-to-44 vote to approve her elevation to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a traditional proving ground for potential justices. The three Republicans who voted to confirm her — and who will be under pressure from Democrats to do so again in the evenly divided Senate — were Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
This time, she’s likely to get several more GOP votes. Confirming a black female justice has its political upside for most senators, and since her elevation to the high court won’t change the ideological balance — currently 6-2 in favor of conservatives — it would be a useful vote for Republicans on the ballot in 2022 and wouldn’t be worth the grief a senator would get in voting “no.”
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