Historic Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings set to begin
WASHINGTON — Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, is going before the Senate Judiciary Committee with the path to her historic confirmation seemingly clear.
Committee hearings begin today for the 51-year-old Jackson, a federal judge for the past nine years. She is expected to present an opening statement late in the day, then answer questions from the committee’s 11 Democrats and 11 Republicans over the next two days.
She appeared before the same committee last year, after President Biden chose her to fill an opening on the federal appeals court in Washington, just down the hill from the Supreme Court.
Her testimony will give most Americans, as well as the Senate, their most extensive look yet at the Harvard-trained lawyer with a resume that includes two years as a federal public defender.
That makes her the first nominee with significant criminal defense experience since Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American to serve on the nation’s highest court.
The American Bar Association, which evaluates judicial nominees, on Friday gave Jackson’s its highest rating, unanimously “well qualified.”
It’s not yet clear how aggressively Republicans will go after Jackson, given that her confirmation would not alter the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., highlighted one potential line of attack. “I’ve noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children,” Hawley wrote on Twitter last week in a thread that was echoed by the Republican National Committee. Hawley did not raise the issue when he questioned Jackson last year before voting against her appeals court confirmation.
The White House pushed back forcefully against the criticism as “toxic and weakly presented misinformation.”
Sentencing expert Douglas Berman, an Ohio State law professor, wrote on his blog that Jackson’s record shows she is skeptical of the range of prison terms recommended for child pornography cases, “but so too were prosecutors in the majority of her cases and so too are district judges nationwide.”