What? You mean there’s another story brewing far from the battlefield in Ukraine? Oh, yeah! We’ve got this U.S. Supreme Court matter to resolve, which is what President Biden is about to do by naming the first black woman to the nation’s highest court.
Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson is about to be nominated by Biden to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer. This goes to show that President Biden is able to, shall we say, “compartmentalize” his thought processes. He can levy punishing economic sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine and in his next move interview qualified candidates for the Supreme Court and then select one of them for the lifetime appointment.
Biden reportedly looked at three finalists for the job. They all are first-rate jurists. Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson once clerked for Justice Breyer and she sits on the D.C. Circuit Court in the seat once held by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
She has a varied legal background, serving as a public defender and a prosecutor. I like the public defender aspect of her career; it gives her a unique perspective that other justices lack when they ponder criminal appeals that come to the highest court in America.
President Biden hopes his nominee wins some Republican support in the Senate. I believe the judge will be confirmed with a bipartisan vote. She has been confirmed already twice for lower-court appointments.
The president vowed to select an African American woman to the court. He kept his pledge. What’s more, he said the nominee would be highly qualified. He kept that pledge, too.
Judge Jackson-Brown’s confirmation won’t change the ideological balance on the court; it will remain a 6-to-3 conservative majority panel. However, the next Supreme Court official photo will look different, with four women sitting with their five male colleagues on a court that didn’t welcome its first female member until 1981.
Let’s not forget as well that Ronald Reagan made a similar pledge while running for the presidency in 1980 to select a woman to the court.
Let the confirmation process move forward with all deliberate speed.
