Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. We Like The Sound Of That.
Elections matter.
Happy Friday to future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson! President Joe Biden announced that he would be nominating Judge Jackson, currently on the Circuit Court in DC, to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. Turns out we can have nice things every once in a while. Good job, America!
Here's a Post article so sweet and wholesome it'll break your heart about Judge Jackson's personal background, growing up as a debate champion and class president in Miami, through Harvard undergrad and law school. TL, DR? Nobody doesn't like this woman.
Oh, come on!
Jackson went on to clerk for three federal judges, including Justice Breyer, and could have gone on to make a mountain of cash in corporate law forever. Indeed she has worked in big law firms, but interspersed with service as a federal public defender and on the US Sentencing Commission, a federal body dedicated to addressing sentencing disparities. This is a deeply thoughtful and moral person, who has now served almost nine years as a jurist on the trial and circuit courts in DC, a traditional Supreme Court feeder.
As law professor Steve Vladeck points out , "Judge Jackson has 8.9 years of prior judicial experience. That’s more than four current Justices (Thomas, Roberts, Kagan, & Barrett) had *combined.*" Good luck to anyone who wants to paint her as inexperienced because she was just last year elevated to the Circuit Court.
She would have been on any Democratic president's short list for a Supreme Court vacancy, and indeed she was considered by Barack Obama back in 2016 to fill Antonin Scalia's seat. And it is about damn time that we get a Black woman on our nation's highest court, but it's pretty likely that Judge Jackson would have been the nominee even if Biden hadn't promised to do it. She is exceptionally qualified, and she lived her whole life knowing that she had to work twice as hard and not slip up. You can be damn sure that this woman who went to public school in Florida wasn't spending weekends getting shitfaced with Squee and Tobin.
The GOP is naturally winding up to pretend Judge Jackson is a card carrying member of the Black Panther Party who wants to outlaw churches and legalize heroin.
"Joe Biden just nominated a radical, left-wing activist to serve a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. His pick was the preferred choice of far-left special interests. Republicans will make sure voters know how radical his pick really is," they promised, before noting that she donated to Obama and represented a Guantanamo detainee as a federal public defender.
Yawnnnnnn.
It's ridiculous, and so pungently racist that Republicans are already trying to prophylactically cast themselves as taking the high ground.
“No matter what, Judge Jackson will be given the dignity and respect she deserves. The American people will see a starkly different process from the treatment of Justice Kavanaugh and other judicial nominees during the previous administration," Senator John Cornyn huffed to CNN's Manu Raju. Which is, as they say, fucking rich coming from the people who blockaded Merrick Garland and then ditched the filibuster rule for Supreme Court justices five minutes after taking back the White House.
Judge Jackson was confirmed to the Circuit Court last year with the support of Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and oddly enough Lindsey Graham.
Naturally Graham, who had advocated hard for the more conservative Judge Michelle Childs, is looking to memory hole his prior support for Jackson.
"If media reports are accurate, and Judge Jackson has been chosen as the Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Breyer, it means the radical Left has won President Biden over yet again. The attacks by the Left on Judge Childs from South Carolina apparently worked," he sulked, adding that "The Harvard-Yale train to the Supreme Court continues to run unabated."
Haha, okay. Justices Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh all went to Harvard and/or Yale, and that didn't bother Graham a bit. But sure, buddy, knock yourself out whining that the descendant of slaves, who went to public school in Florida and worked her ass off her whole life, is some kind of entitled elitist.
What ever.
Brass tacks? Biden spent a long time in the Senate, and he can count heads. If he thought he was going to need Lindsey Graham's support, he'd have nominated Childs. Judge Jackson is a terrific choice, and this is a good day.
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Or thoroughly laughed at.
Interestingly, after our exchange, I read something that said Sasse has posted “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” to his Twitter bio. I’m not on Twitter, but I checked, and it appears that he does have this message written Ukrainian on his profile. The photo at the top also appears to be of an older Ukrainian woman aiming a gun.
Of course, his official “political” account doesn’t have any of this. His last tweets there appear to be from August 2021, and are complaints about how Biden withdraw from Afghanistan.