After the Senate voted 53-47 to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the high court, we now proudly call her Justice Jackson. Many understandably celebrate that she’s the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Though Jackson herself insists she approaches each case neutrally, weighing only the facts, laws and constitutional questions at hand, people aren’t robots. Our backgrounds shape our worldviews and therefore matter. Beyond her skin color, it matters that the Supreme Court will have its fourth female member, its third graduate of a public high school, and perhaps most importantly, its first former public defender, balancing a federal judiciary that’s prosecutor-heavy.
It is a sad show of toxic partisanship that only three Republicans — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney — could bring themselves to deem Jackson, whose judicial bona fides make her as qualified as any nominee in memory, fit for the court. We say this having supported the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, a judge with whom we have major philosophical disagreements, who was appointed by a president we reviled, following Mitch McConnell’s politically criminal blockage of Merrick Garland’s nomination months prior.
A president, any president, should have qualified, in-the-mainstream nominees confirmed.
That principle should’ve been even easier to affirm after Jackson demonstrated an impressive command of the law and outstanding temperament during her hearings. Instead, 94% of Senate Republicans in the end gave credence to utterly dishonest attacks on her sentencing of defendants convicted of child pornography offenses, one of many divisive gambits by presidential aspirants Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton to paint Jackson as a blinkered progressive ideologue.
In perhaps the worst gotcha of all, Marsha Blackburn asked Jackson to define a woman — and when the judge demurred rather than give a glib (and likely legally incorrect) answer about chromosomes or ovaries, the GOP insisted Jackson is a total relativist on gender. She’s no such thing, as she later made clear.
We expect this brilliant and rigorous judge will make a fine justice. It is a supreme pity her confirmation broke almost entirely along party lines.
