Grace under grueling pressure confirms it: Jackson is ready

Judicial temperament means keeping one’s cool when you would be thoroughly entitled to lose it. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, passed that test admirably through 22 hours over two grueling days before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She was dignified and patient in the face of petulant sniping, hostility and unprecedented rudeness from some of her Republican inquisitors.

Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz were particularly disgraceful, deserving of the chairman’s rebukes. Graham’s tantrums befitted a two-year-old. He had voted to confirm Jackson to an appeals court judgeship just nine months ago, knowing everything then he claims to know now. Nothing has changed, other than that the president didn’t choose the South Carolina senator’s home state candidate.

Regrettably, his backflip signals that the forthcoming votes in committee and on the floor will be close. They shouldn’t be. Jackson is an outstanding nominee, a credit to the president, to the senators who will vote to confirm her — and to Florida, the state where she grew up and charted a path to academic excellence and judicial prominence.

Hard as they tried, Republicans couldn’t contrive even one justification to deny her confirmation as an associate justice. She would bring to the court a wealth of experience and qualifications beyond that of anyone else. Last week, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary unanimously awarded her its highest rating, “well qualified.”

Both sides of the bench

The significance goes beyond simply becoming the first Black woman justice in the court’s 233-year history. Jackson would also be the first to have been a public defender. Later a trial judge, now on the Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. circuit, she would also be the only justice to have seen the criminal justice system from both sides of the bench. That is an essential real-world perspective that high courts commonly lack. The political process, whether state or federal, is biased in favor of prosecutors for judgeships.

There has been no defense experience on the court since Thurgood Marshall retired 31 years ago, but plenty of weight on the other side. Seven of the nine sitting justices previously served as prosecutors or in the U.S. Department of Justice. Only Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett did not.

It was particularly despicable for the Republicans to nitpick her work as a defender and how she sentenced people on the District of Columbia bench. It was in keeping, of course, with their tawdry tactics of demagoguing hot-button issues like crime and critical race theory, the card that Cruz played to his own embarrassment. What’s taught or read in the private school on whose board Jackson sits is no business of politicians.

The hearing exemplified what the syndicated columnist Mary McGrory explained after Miami’s Janet Reno endured a milder inquisition in 1993 on her nomination to be attorney general:

“What the Senate Judiciary Committee needs,” McGrory wrote, “is a banner on the back wall reading: ‘THIS HEARING IS NOT ABOUT YOU.’ ”

‘Jackassery’

Jackson’s hearing was less about her than the presidential ambitions of Cruz and Sens. Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, who spent the two days proving McGrory right. Even Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, another potential candidate for the Republican nomination, referred to it as the “jackassery” of “people mugging for the cameras.”

Among the other “firsts” that Jackson would bring to the Supreme Court is a point of great pride to our state and South Florida particularly.

She was raised and educated here from the age of four until she left for Harvard University, having graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High, an outstanding public school that prepared her well. In her opening statement, she remembered “my high school debate coach, Fran Berger, may she rest in peace,” who introduced her to forensics and to Harvard, and who taught her to believe in herself.

Although Jackson settled elsewhere to practice law, she is forever a Floridian. No one else from our state has held so high a rank as the one to which President Biden has nominated her.

Florida is particularly invested in her success and in her confirmation. It would behoove Sen. Marco Rubio to remember that. In November, the voters will.

The world is watching also, as Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga, remarked toward the close of Jackson’s trial by Senate.

The seamiest Republican tactic was to impugn Jackson’s service as an assistant federal public defender, which called on her to represent four Guantanamo detainees. That line of attack was faithless to their oaths of office and to their obligation as lawyers. The Constitution entitles everyone to a defense. The criminal justice system cannot function otherwise.

A noble calling

Criminal defense law is a noble calling. Only dictatorships devalue it. The leading example in American history was set by John Adams, the future second president, six years before the Revolution that he did so much to inspire.

The case is known as the Boston Massacre. No other lawyer in Boston was willing to defend the British soldiers who had panicked in the face of an abusive mob that was hurling curses and stones. A single volley from their muskets killed five men. Adams’ masterful defense got their captain and six of the soldiers acquitted. Two others were convicted of manslaughter; the punishment was to be branded on their thumbs.

Adams’ involvement was unpopular at the time, but as biographer David McCullough relates, his “part in the drama did increase his public standing, making him in the long run more respected than ever.” He looked back on it as “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”

The senators who vote to confirm Judge Jackson’s nomination will be entitled to say the same.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@ sun-sentinel.com.