Grace and gravitas: Ketanji Brown Jackson takes high road to the high court
The performance of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson before the Senate Judicial Committee was stellar. Impeccable. Superb.
Republicans who want to block her ascent to the highest court in the land have a hard road to hoe. Racism and brazen GOP partisanship are the only weapons that Republicans can wield against Brown Jackson. They will fail if only because the Democrats in the Senate have the votes to confirm her regardless of Republican opposition.
It’s a done deal. The only question is how many Republicans are willing to vote against the clear case for confirmation for racist or ideological reasons. One can never underestimate the role of racism and the rabid racism of the GOP majority but those who vote against Brown Jackson should be symbolically branded with the scarlet letter R racist. The Republicans will do anything and everything to deny a Black woman a Supreme Court appointment despite sterling qualifications
Racism is only the main reason Republicans want to block Brown Jackson. The fact of a woman nominee who is unlikely to support the GOP anti-abortion crusade is also a big factor. The biggest clowns in Congress, extremist, hyper-partisans — Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Josh Hawley — have been at the forefront of the attacks on Brown Jackson.
Lindsey Graham, the shape-shifting senator from South Carolina, hit a new low even for him. He asked the nominee about her religious beliefs. That’s an impermissible question under the constitutional doctrine that there should be no religious test for public office in the United States. Brown Jackson said she was a Protestant, reflecting her transparent response even to out-of-bounds questions.
Cruz brought a children’s book to make a culture war point about critical race theory, the latest Republican hobby horse. Hawley, the Missouri senator, argued that the judge was inclined to give sexual predators light sentences. Yet, a Missouri judge whose nomination Hawley supported, has a record of sentencing in such cases that is identical to Brown Jackson’s. Hawley’s attempt to cast Brown Jackson’s record as “out of the mainstream” thus was revealed as both false and cynical.
But although this trio stands out as especially obnoxious, with probably one or two exceptions Republican senators are all part of the circus and will vote against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s historic nomination regardless. If confirmed, Brown Jackson would be the first Black woman and the first Floridian on the Supreme Court. Republicans don’t care.
But Democrats have the votes to confirm Brown Jackson even if zero Republicans vote for her. It is obvious from their questions and their body language that this is a bitter pill for Republicans to swallow. When Antonin Scalia, a very smart jurist and a dyed-in-the wool reactionary, was up for confirmation Democrats looked beyond ideology and Scalia was confirmed unanimously.
Brown Jackson deserves the same treatment, but she won’t get it. The near unanimity of Republican senators on this and virtually every other issue reflects the ideological hardening of the Republican Party, the transformation of an erstwhile conservative party into a solidly reactionary one.
All the loose talk about “polarization” assumes the process has been symmetrical. In fact, Republicans have been the ones moving—to the farthest pole in right field. Democrats today are not fundamentally to the left of Democrats in the Lyndon Johnson welfare state era. The Republican Party of Donald Trump is much farther to the right than the Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower that taxed high earners heavily.
Brown Jackson’s grace and gravitas don’t count for much to senators, who come reelection, must rely on voters stricken with a virus that strikes mainly Republicans. No, not Covid-19: white panic, a condition brought on by the country’s changing demographics and the political ascent of minorities to positions in Congress, the presidency, and now the Supreme Court.
In response, Republicans in Congress have followed their base and retreated behind fortified racial and ideological trenches. They reject the realities of the new America and want to move back to a monochrome America that never was outside their own perceptions and imagination.
That is what Donald Trump promised and the reason so many voted for him. But every Obama and Brown Jackson is a reality check that some behind the trenches take as a personal affront. Then there are those of us on the other side of the trenches who see the success of these figures as a victory for the yet unrealized idea of the nation.
