With all due respect

Jackson achieves historic confirmation to Supreme Court

Soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson finally got the respect she was due last week at the White House celebration of her historic confirmation.

It came just a day after the U.S. Senate’s 53-47 vote to make Jackson the first Black woman ever to be confirmed as a justice on the nation’s high court.

Every Democratic senator and three of their Republican colleagues — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — gave her what passes for bipartisan support in their Thursday confirmation vote.

The vote came, of course, after frequently rancorous confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where members ultimately split evenly with all Democrats supporting her confirmation and all Republicans opposing it.

A procedural vote by the full Senate was necessary to get the nomination to the floor, but she was ultimately confirmed.

When she was, there were cheers in the Senate chamber and its galleries to mark the barrier-breaking vote. Unfortunately, most Republican senators streamed out the door in one last affront to this highly qualified future justice.

Jackson, 51, will take her seat later this summer, when Justice Stephen Breyer retires at the end of the court’s term. In the interim, Jackson will continue as a federal appellate judge in Washington D.C.

On Friday, President Joe Biden, who kept a campaign promise to nominate a Black woman justice, filled the White House lawn with Judge Jackson’s family and supporters to mark the moment properly.

Jackson will be but the third Black justice, following Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. She will be the court’s sixth woman justice and will join three other women on the current court — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett.

What won’t change is the current 6-3 conservative balance on the court, but Jackson will nonetheless help bring a different perspective to deliberations.

Notably, it will be the first time in the Supreme Court’s history that white men have not held the majority of the nine-member court.

“It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Jackson said. “But we’ve made it. We’ve made it, all of us.”

In her own family, Jackson said, it took just one generation “to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States,” suggesting progress toward a “more perfect union.”

The nation learned of Jackson’s background in her confirmation hearings and elsewhere. Anyone who cared to listen discovered she was a daughter of parents who were educated in segregated schools, a determined young woman who got into Harvard College and Harvard Law and excelled in both.

She clerked for Justice Breyer and two other federal jurists, and worked in diverse areas of the law, including private practice and as a federal public defender. And she served as vice chair of the Federal Sentencing Commission, one of three federal appointments for which she received earlier bipartisan Senate confirmation.

She was a federal district judge in Washington for most of a decade before her more recent appointment to the appellate court for the D.C. Circuit.

Jackson’s confirmation was historic because she is a Black woman, but she earned the nomination because of her indisputable credentials for the job.

She has a record and every bit of it was fair game for the brutal hearings she endured last month.

It was the way the Republicans asked their questions, or rather the way some of them did, that was so brutal — and infuriating.

The president himself later praised Jackson’s “incredible character and integrity” during the confirmation process, asserting that she had put up with “verbal abuse, the anger, constant interruptions, the most-vile, baseless assertions and accusations.”

She really did.

Among the offenders was Arkansas’ junior senator, Tom Cotton. He, like a handful of other committee members, seemed more interested in scoring points for themselves than in actually getting answers from the nominee.

The consequence of all that posturing by the most adamant foes of Jackson’s confirmation was to take up hearing time that might have more productively explored what kind of a justice she might make.

Nevertheless, Jackson endured the hearings, modeled precisely the behavior a patient judge must and demonstrated why Biden chose this judge for such an historic role.