Historic confirmation hearing showed the progress and ugliness of American politics
Some Republicans suggested the first Black woman nominated for the Supreme Court was soft on crime and raised combative questions that carried racial undertones.
If confirmed, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would be the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. White House photo.
The historic confirmation hearing for groundbreaking Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson showed the good and the ugliness of American politics.
President Joe Biden chose Jackson in February, fulfilling a campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, she would take the seat of Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced in January that he would retire this summer after 28 years.
Jackson would be the third Black justice, after Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and the sixth woman. Her confirmation would maintain the current 6-3 conservative majority on the court.
Democrats who control the Senate by a slim margin hope to wrap up Jackson’s confirmation before Easter.
The weeklong hearing for Jackson showed the significant progress the nation has made toward racial and gender equality in nominating the first Black woman to the high court. But the badgering and disrespect shown toward Jackson by many Republican senators also showed how much further the United States still has to go toward full justice and equality.
To her credit, Jackson effectively responded to Republican hostility in the confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Facing GOP senators’ rapid-fire hostile questions, Jackson forcefully defended her record as a federal judge and declared she will rule “from a position of neutrality” if confirmed as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Some of the questions were not just outside the purview of a Supreme Court nominee; they were extremely inappropriate or outright bizarre.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would you say you are, in terms of religion?”, asked Republican Senator Lindsey from South Carolina.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s asked Jackson irrelevant questions about Critical Race Theory and children’s books.
Republican senators mainly used their questioning in an attempt to brand Jackson — and Democrats in general — as soft on crime. Voters should expect this to be a recurring emerging theme in the GOP midterm election campaigns.
This is an old tiresome tactic. A half-century ago, Republicans portrayed the first Black nominee to the court, Thurgood Marshall as soft on crime in his work defending Black people.
Jackson responded to Republicans who have questioned whether she is too liberal in her judicial philosophy, saying she tries to “understand what the people who created this law intended.” She said she relies on the words of statutes but also looks to history and practice when the meaning may not be clear.
She pushed back strongly against the absurd suggestions that she has given light sentences to child pornographers. Could her rulings have endangered children? “As a mother and a judge,” she said, “nothing could be further from the truth.” She described looking into the eyes of defendants and emphasizing the lifelong effects on victims. She said it is “important to me to represent that the children’s voices are represented.”
Jackson effectively rebutted Republican criticism of her record on criminal matters as a judge, a federal public defender and a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency created by Congress to reduce disparity in federal prison sentences.
Republicans tried to link Jackson to the left-leaning “defund the police” movements, but it’s unlikely that approach will work when she has the backing from the nation's largest law enforcement organization, the Fraternal Order of Police, and she has spoken emotionally about her brother and uncle who worked as police officers.
Jackson told the committee that her brother and two uncles served as police officers, and “crime and the effect on the community, and the need for law enforcement — those are not abstract concepts or political slogans to me.” She also defended work as a public defender and later in private practice representing four Guantanamo Bay detainees.
While some Republicans have complained that Jackson was defending terrorists, she noted that defenders don’t pick their clients and are “standing up for the constitutional value of representation.” Jackson said she continued to represent one client in private practice because her firm happened to be assigned his case. Texas Sen. John Cornyn falsely asked why she would have called former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former President George W. Bush “war criminals” in a legal filing. “It seems so out of character for you,” Cornyn said. She never referred to anyone as a war criminal, but she did argue that torture amounted to a war crime under the law and that the federal government, including Bush and Rumsfeld, was ultimately responsible.
Republican senators focused on a narrow slice of the judge's work; the child pornography cases that Jackson herself has said are among “the most difficult” of her career — some of which still give her nightmares.
Some of the Republican senators attempted to use the confirmation hearing to settle political scores. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham voted for her confirmation as an appeals court judge last year but has openly expressed his frustration after President Joe Biden picked her over a South Carolina judge. Graham asked her about her religion, and how often she goes to church, in angry comments about what he said was unfair criticism of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholicism ahead of her 2020 confirmation. Jackson — who thanked God in her opening statement and said that her faith “sustains me at this moment” — responded that she is a Protestant. But she said she is reluctant to talk about her faith in detail because “I want to be mindful of the need for the public to have confidence in my ability to separate out my personal views.”
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., spoke emotionally about the “joy” he felt about her historic nomination. Booker, who is Black, said the white men who have sat on the Supreme Court for two centuries were “extraordinary patriots who helped shape this country” but that many people could have never dreamed of sitting on the court. Jackson, who grew up in Miami, noted that she did not have to attend racially segregated public schools like her own parents did, “and the fact that we had come that far was to me a testament to the hope and the promise of this country, the greatness of America that in one generation we could go from racially segregated schools in Florida to have me sitting here as the first Floridian ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States.” Jackson would not only be the first Black woman but also the first public defender on the court, and first with experience representing indigent criminal defendants since Justice Thurgood Marshall. Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said that to be first, “often, you have to be the best, in some ways the bravest.” Jackson has the temperament, intellect and legal experience to be on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Legal experts praised Jackson in the final day of hearings, with a top lawyers’ group saying its review found she has a “sterling” reputation, “exceptional” competence and is well qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.
“Outstanding, excellent, superior, superb,” testified Ann Claire Williams, chair of the American Bar Association committee that makes recommendations on federal judges. “Those are the comments from virtually everyone we interviewed.”
Williams said the group spoke to more than 250 judges and lawyers about Jackson. “The question we kept asking ourselves: How does one human being do so much so extraordinarily well?”
Despite her exceptional record, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced only hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee wrapped up four days of hearings that he will vote against confirming Jackson, saying he “cannot and will not” support the nominee for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.
Expect many fellow Republicans to follow suit.
McConnell criticized the liberal groups that have supported Jackson, and he criticized her for refusing to take a position on the size of the nine-member court, even though that decision is ultimately up to Congress. Some advocacy groups have pushed for enlarging the court after three of President Donald Trump's nominees cemented a conservative majority.
McConnell’s criticism is disingenuous. According to his logic, conservative members of the high court should have been disqualified for receiving support from conservative groups.
Regarding Jackson's response to enlarging the court, this is consistent with her refusal to take a position on policy matters that are for lawmakers to decide.
In the end, her record and confirmation hearing did not matter to McConnell and others of his ilk. Some had either openly expressed or signaled their opposition before the confirmation hearing began. They were never going to vote for her.
Fortunately, Democrats can confirm Jackson, the first Black woman nominated for the nation's highest court, without any GOP support in the 50-50 Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman in her position, can cast the tie breaking vote.
Jackson showed extraordinary grace under the pressure of Republican senators’ absurd mischaracterization of her record. She demonstrated that she was well qualified to be on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Irv Randolph is an award-winning journalist and political commentator. For more opinion visit The Randolph Report.