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Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal appeals-court judge, was confirmed to the US supreme court on Thursday, overcoming a rancorous Senate approval process to become the first black woman to serve as a justice on the US’s highest court.
After weeks of private meetings and days of public testimony, marked by intense sparring over judicial philosophy and personal reflections on race in America, Ms Justice Jackson’s nomination to the supreme court crossed the 50-vote threshold in the Senate on Thursday afternoon, guaranteeing her confirmation.
The final Senate vote was 53 to 47 in favour of her appointment as the 116th justice on the court.
Jackson, who currently serves on the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, will replace Mr Justice Stephen Breyer (83), the most senior member of the supreme court’s liberal bloc. Breyer, for whom Ms Justice Jackson clerked early in her legal career, said he intended to retire from the court this summer.
At 51, Ms Justice Jackson is young enough to serve on the court for decades. Her ascension, however, will do little to tilt the ideological balance of the court, dominated by a 6-3 conservative majority.
Shortly before the final vote in the Senate on the nomination, Kyrsten Sinema announced she would vote yes on Ms Justice Jackson’s nomination, ensuring that all 50 Democratic senators would support confirmation.
“Judge Jackson brings to the bench a wealth of knowledge, more trial court experience than all other current supreme court justices combined, a commitment to respect precedent, and a proven independent, pragmatic approach to judicial decisions,” Ms Sinema said.
“Judge Jackson has exceptional qualifications and will serve our country well in the years to come.”
Ahead of the vote, three Senate Republicans – Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine – indicated they would back Ms Justice Jackson’s nomination.
Republican criticism
Assailing Ms Justice Jackson’s record, but acknowledging Republicans did not have the votes to stop her confirmation, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell implored the judge to embrace the textualist approach of conservative justices.
Her confirmation to the lifetime post represents the fulfillment of a promise US president Joe Biden made to his supporters at the nadir of his 2020 campaign for the presidency. During that time Mr Biden had vowed to nominate the first black woman to the supreme court if he was elected president and a vacancy on the court arose. The opportunity presented itself earlier this year.
During the public confirmation hearings, Ms Justice Jackson vowed to be an independent justice who would seek to ensure that the words inscribed on the marbled supreme court building – Equal justice under the law – were a “reality and not just an ideal”. With her parents and daughters present, Ms Justice Jackson recounted for the Senate judiciary committee her family’s generational journey, as the daughter of public school teachers raised in the segregated south who would rise to become a justice on a court that once denied black Americans citizenship.
Yet any hope by the White House that Ms Justice Jackson’s historic nomination might defuse some of the bitter partisanship that senators lament has turned the confirmation process for the court into a “circus” quickly evaporated.
With an eye to the November midterm elections, Republicans led an aggressive campaign against the judge during her confirmation hearings and in conservative media, raising questions about her record in an effort to paint her as an “activist judge” who was soft on crime.
Couched in thinly coded appeals to racism and the far-right fringes with nods to conspiracy theories, some Republicans accused Ms Justice Jackson of being too lenient on child sex abuse offenders, claims she forcefully rebutted “as a mother and a judge”. Legal experts have said her decisions in such criminal cases were within the mainstream, while independent fact-checkers concluded that the attacks were misleading and a distortion of her record.
Restraint
Democrats and the handful of Republicans who supported her praised her qualifications and demeanour, and in particular the restraint she showed during some stinging exchanges with conservative senators. They sought to defend her record, noting that her sentencing record was within the mainstream of the federal judiciary, while emphasising the support she had earned from within the legal community, including among conservative justices, and her endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police, which cited her family’s law enforcement background.
In a mark of just how polarising the process of confirming a supreme court nominee has become, the Senate judiciary committee deadlocked along party lines over her nomination. The resulting tie prompted Democrats to execute a rare procedural manoeuvre to “discharge” her nomination from the committee to the floor, with a vote by the full Senate.
A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, Ms Justice Jackson served on the independent US sentencing commission, an agency that develops sentencing guidelines, before becoming a federal judge.
While she shares an elite background with the other justices, her work as a public defender sets her apart. The last justice with experience representing criminal defendants was Thurgood Marshall, the towering civil rights lawyer who became the first black member of the supreme court. – Guardian