In his latest Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley muses about what sort of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will be:
Judge Jackson’s résumé is impressive by any objective standard. She attended top-ranked schools, where she excelled in her studies, and later clerked for the justice she has been nominated to succeed. Her professional career would probably be even more impressive if she hadn’t taken less-demanding jobs while raising young children, which is something that shouldn’t be held against any working parent.
Nevertheless, some Republicans are in payback mode. They remember the spectacle that Democrats made of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. They recall Mr. Biden’s prominent role in blocking the appellate court nominations of Janice Rogers Brown (a black judge) and Miguel Estrada (a Hispanic lawyer), both of whom were on President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court short list. And Republicans certainly haven’t forgotten what Mr. Biden put Justice Thomas through three decades ago. Nor should they.
That history notwithstanding, questioning Judge Jackson’s judicial philosophy would be far more constructive than questioning her qualifications. It’s also a more principled reason to oppose her nomination. Judge Jackson is the preferred choice of progressives primarily because she served as vice chairman of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and has advocated for more-lenient punishment of convicted criminals. Like many on the social-justice left, she seems to have more sympathy for criminals than for their victims, even though low-income blacks and Hispanics are more likely than other groups to be targets of violent crime.
As we know from experience past performance is no indication of future results when it comes to Supreme Court justices but I suspect we can expect Judge Jackson’s interests to remain the same when she is confirmed. I do think she should be confirmed—I believe that absent serious disqualifying facts coming to light a president’s appointments should be confirmed. I also don’t think confirmation hearings are something you’d want to be conducting when the mid-term campaigns begin in earnest. Perhaps the Republicans in the Senate see it differently.
