Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed this Thursday by the vote of the full Senate (53-47) and will become the first African-American woman to reach the Supreme Court by the United States Senate. She and she did it with votes from both parties.
The Republicans Susan Collinsstarting tomorrow; Lisa MurkowskiAlaska), and Mitt Romneyfrom Utah, voted for the judge, breaking with their party line
Shortly before, the three had added their votes to the Democratic caucus to close the debate and proceed to the final vote.
After a long wait for Republican Senator Rand Paul, who used up the 15 minutes allotted for the vote and cast his negative vote right at the end of that time, Vice President Kamala Harris, in her capacity as Senate President, announced the final result with which ratified the appointment of the new magistrate.
Immediately afterwards there was a great ovation to celebrate the result in which he highlighted the loneliness of Senator Romney applauding standing up on the side where the Republican caucus sits, which by that time had almost abandoned the entire room.
Brown Jackson witnessed the vote at the White House alongside President Joe Biden, according to correspondents covering the presidential residence. Both are scheduled to take part in an event at the White House on Friday to mark the occasion.
Brown Jackson, 51, will replace Judge Stephen Breyer when he retires from the court at the end of June, when the current session ends.
Nominated for the President Biden, Brown Jackson is the third African American to become a Supreme Court justice after Thurgood Marshall (who served from 1967 to 1991) and Clarence Thomas. Also, she is the sixth woman.
The presence of Jackson in the highest court in the country will not alter the so-called balance of the Supreme Court, which favors the conservatives by 6 magistrates against 3 of liberal leanings.
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Although he did not get any support from the Conservatives in the Judiciary Committeeon the Senate floor Collins, Murkowsky and Romney helped the Democratic majority overcome the “vote deadlock,” bring the nomination to the floor and bolster the simple majority they needed to confirm her in office.
The three had advanced the direction of their vote with a similar argument: they will not agree with all their decisions, but they have no doubt that Judge Jackson meets the standards of capacity as a jurist and honorability required of members of the highest court of the nation.
And this bipartisan nature of his appointmenteven if it is only by three votes, is still an achievement for Biden in these times of polarization and with the Senate divided 50-50.
In any case, in addition to the bitter interrogations, there were also moments of emotion, in particular when the Democratic senator Cory Booker (New Jersey), who is also African-American, brought the judge to tears with her passionate defense of her candidacy.
“Don’t worry sister, don’t worry, God is with you. And how do I know? Because you’re here and I know what it’s taken for you to be in that seat,” Booker said.
Who is Ketanji Brown Jackson?
During the hearings, Jackson explained that his parents, then public school teachers, gave him an African name to express “pride in his ancestors and hope for the future.” they chose Ketanji Onyika because they had been told it meant “lovely.”
Graduated from the prestigious Harvard University Law School, she worked as an assistant to Judge Breyer between 1999 and 2000. In addition to being a lawyer in the private sector, she was a public defender.
In 2013, the then president, Barack Obamanominated her for a trial court judge position in the District of Columbia.
And in 2021, at the suggestion of Biden, she became a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. So Senator Romney voted against it. But Lindsey Graham voted for it, and now she doesn’t.
In that court, Jackson was part of the three-judge panel that dismissed efforts by former President Donald Trump not to turn over documents to the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on Capitol Hill.
to try to glimpse What will your work be like in the Supreme Court?Republicans kept asking him what his judicial philosophy is. Conservative judges tend to adhere to originalism or textualism, which tend to interpret the text of the Constitution, of 1787, in its literal terms. Other more liberal theories include living constitutionalism, seeking to adapt what was said in the Magna Carta to modern reality.
Jackson assured that his work is not registered in any current. “I have been a judge for almost a decade and I take my responsibility and my duty to be independent very seriously,” she said. “ I decide each case from a neutral position. I evaluate the facts, interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor, in accordance with my oath.”