Amidst all the news weekly jockeying for our attention, some issues and events understandably attract significantly more. This past week we saw the war in Ukraine heartbreakingly continue… we saw former Pres. Barack Obama return to the White House and the entire room again excited to see a president… we also witnessed the confirmation of another Supreme Court justice. The 51 year-old Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former appeals court judge with nine years experience on the federal bench, was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday.
For years I’ve struggled with how our legislators treat Supreme Court nominees. Something has just seemed off. Let me be a little more blunt. Something has seemed wrong. Disrespectful of people, disrespectful of the process, and wrong.
Part of the difficulty in accurately assessing the wrongdoing is because oh-so-many justify disrespect of the people or process from one side only. That makes no sense to me.
With the confirmation of Jackson — who will serve as the third black justice, the second current black justice alongside Clarence Thomas, and the first black female justice — I heard more acknowledge publicly the lack of integrity long embedded in the process.
First, from Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat on the Senate floor last week, when addressing the 4 or 5 senators he believed treated Jackson’s nomination inappropriately:
“We’ve done it, too, on the Democratic side. I’m gonna be first to admit, as I look back in history, there are things that should have been handled better when Republican nominees were before us.”
The admissions continued, as Sen. Chris Coons, the Democrat from Delaware, acknowledged in his sit-down interview with PBS this week. He was asked by PBS, “As you think about the current forces that have increasingly polarized the process and your own votes for Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, do you stand by them? Or do you think in a different world you might have thought about those votes differently?”
Said Coons: “I’ve recently been talking about that with some colleagues. So I was — my office now was John McCain’s office — and I think a lot about John. I was in that exact office with a bipartisan group of senators as Judge Gorsuch was being nominated for the Supreme Court, and a group of us were debating whether we could somehow come up with an agreement to not end the filibuster — the 60 vote threshold for justices — in exchange for allowing Gorsuch to move forward. And as I was digging into his record and philosophy, there was one case, the Hobby Lobby case, where he’d written the circuit court, and I just was really struggling with it. I would say Gorsuch was the closest for me where I knew him, I had a sense of him, his writings.”
Back to the interviewer: “But is it about judicial philosophy or advice and consent?” [Note: all emphasis mine.]
Coons: “That’s the point. That was the point at which I first voted against a nominee for the Supreme Court not based on his qualifications; he’s eminently qualified, great temperament, good writer, strong record of service. But I disagreed with his philosophy.
And Senator [Lindsay] Graham and I had a very forceful exchange at that point, where he said to me, ‘I voted for [Justice Elena] Kagan. I voted for [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor. If you’re not willing to vote for Gorsuch, what’s that mean?’
And so I will own that I’m a part of this problem — and recognize that with Senator Graham saying in this [Jackson’s] process — he’s voting against her — he was the last one on the committee who had a history of voting for qualification, not for or against philosophy.”
And therein lies the problem. Being qualified matters less than sharing political philosophy. On the left. On the right. And we only point it out when the other side does it; we make excuses for our own entrenched pathways of political thinking.
One of the wiser, non-politically-motivated voices in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s judicial pursuit came from the former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican. Ryan and Jackson are related by marriage.
Said Ryan: “Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal. She is an amazing person, and I favorably recommend her consideration.”
I wish our politics quit impeding our ability to see who’s qualified.
And amazing. On all sides.
Respectfully…
AR