Ketanji Brown Jackson promised to defend the US constitution and what she called the “grand experiment of American democracy” in her opening remarks to the Senate confirmation hearings that could see her become the first Black woman to sit on the US supreme court since in its 233 years of existence.
Jackson, 51, addressed the Senate judiciary committee on Monday at the start of four days of potentially bruising partisan wrangling over her nomination. She struck a conciliatory tone, stressing her ideological neutrality.
“I have been a judge for nearly a decade and I take my responsibility to be independent very seriously,” she told the 22 senators in front of her. “I decide cases from a neutral posture.”
She also encouraged the committee to see her nomination in its history-making context. She noted that her parents had moved from Florida to Washington DC where she was brought up to flee racial segregation, and said they had given her an African name out of both “pride in their heritage and hope for the future”.
The groundbreaking nature of confirmation hearings that could seat the first African American woman in the nation’s highest court since it was founded in 1789 resounded around the committee room. Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the committee who opened the proceedings, pointed out that when the court first sat there were almost 700,000 people enslaved in the US, with no citizenship rights or access to equal justice.
“You are living witness to the fact that, in America, all is possible,” Durbin said. “We’ve come a long way since 1790, and we know we still have to form a more perfect union.”
Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey who is the only Black member of the committee, also seized on the historic nature of the occasion. “Today we should rejoice. This is the America in which anybody can achieve anything,” he said.
If Democratic managers were hoping that history in the making would lead to a smooth and dignified confirmation process, they were quickly disabused. Within minutes of the clack of Durbin’s gavel, Republican committee members sought to puncture Jackson’s reputation by attacking her “radical” liberal connections.
Chuck Grassley, from Iowa, portrayed the nominee as a darling of progressive “dark money” groups which he claimed were “soft on crime” at a time when violent crime was sweeping big cities.
Josh Hawley, of Missouri, doubled down on his incendiary accusation last week that in her seven years as a federal district court judge, Jackson showed leniency towards child pornography offenders. Hawley’s claims in a Twitter stream were exposed as baseless and misleading by media fact checkers.
In his opening statement on Monday, Hawley read out a list of seven cases heard by Jackson in her district court days which the senator claimed showed a disparity between relatively lenient sentences she meted out and both existing sentencing guidelines and prosecutors’ requests. Hawley said the cases “troubled” him.
“What concerns me, and I’ve been very candid about this, is that Judge Jackson handed down a lenient sentence that was below the guidelines recommended.”
Jackson’s confirmation, should she survive the whitewater ride of the next few days followed by a full Senate vote by early April, would fundamentally affect not just the public face and diversity of the nation’s highest court.
Though her appointment would not change the six to three rightwing balance of the court – she would replace the liberal justice Stephen Breyer, who is retiring – she could shape the legal landscape of the US for decades to come.
Her appointment could also drastically affect the standing of Joe Biden, the president who nominated her in keeping with a 2020 campaign promise to select a Black woman.
Shortly before the hearings began, Biden spoke out in support of Jackson. He tweeted that she was a “brilliant legal mind with the utmost character and integrity”, who deserved to be confirmed.
In their opening remarks, Democratic senators sought to similarly bolster Jackson’s position before she faces two days of direct questioning.
Patrick Leahy, from Vermont, condemned the idea the nominee was bound to leftwing groups.
“Judge Jackson is no judicial activist,” he said. “She is not a puppet of the so-called radical left.”
Leahy, like several other Democrats, highlighted Jackson’s background in a law enforcement family and pointedly referred to her endorsement by the Fraternal Order of Police.
From their side of the evenly-divided committee, Republican senators laid down the attack lines that will dominate the inquisitorial stage of the hearings which begins on Tuesday. They raised questions about Jackson’s record on several fronts – from whether she would approve of packing the supreme court to dilute its conservative majority to her legal work representing Guantánamo detainees.
Lindsey Graham, from South Carolina, was one of three Republicans who voted to confirm Jackson when she came before the Senate last year for a seat on the US court of appeals for the DC circuit. On Monday, he took a strikingly more hostile line.
He asked why liberal groups that want to reform the supreme court, such as Demand Justice, were backing her. These were the “most radical elements of the Democratic party with the most radical views of how to be a judge – and you are their choice”, Graham said.
Other leading Republican members of the committee – several with presidential ambitions – laid out their stall in front of the TV cameras. Ted Cruz listed several of the most toxic fault lines of American society: hate speech, religious liberty, abortion rights, the right to bear arms and crime.
Democratic managers have very little wriggle room in their bid to put Jackson on the bench. With a 50-50 split in the Senate, and Vice-President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote, the Democrats cannot afford even a single defection should every Republican vote against her.
Born in Washington, Jackson was brought up largely in Florida and attended Harvard law school. If confirmed, she would be unique among supreme court justices in that she had two years’ experience as a public defender representing criminal defendants.
She has been on the federal bench since 2013, rising to the US appeals court for the DC circuit last year. That court has been labelled the “second highest court in the land” because so many supreme court justices have been plucked from there.
