Judge Jackson tries for a Senate reset
WASHINGTON >> Engaging in lawyerly small talk, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley was telling Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson this past week how he met his wife while clerking at the high court.
Jackson already knew the story, he discovered. She even “filled in some of the details for me.”
“So I thought — she's very well prepared.”
Jackson was prepared, as well, for the Republican senator's questions about Guantanamo Bay detainees she represented 15 years ago as a public defender and, after that, in private practice. Hawley said after the meeting that he is still concerned about that part of her record but found her forthcoming and engaging, with a “very high degree” of legal acumen.
“I think her hearings will be very substantive,” he said.
Jackson, who sits on the federal appeals court and would replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, is unlikely to need support from Hawley or any other Republican to be confirmed, and may not win over any of them. But as she makes the rounds at the Capitol, traversing from one Senate office to the next before her confirmation hearings later this month, Jackson is networking with zeal, restoring a collegial tone to a confirmation process that had grown increasingly embittered during the Trump era.
“I want to make this a bipartisan vote,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said after Breyer announced his retirement. “I think it is not only good for the Supreme Court, it's good for the Senate.”
Democrats and the White House are hoping that Jackson's enviable resume, empathetic style and historic potential as the first Black female justice will win at least a few crossover votes. And because her confirmation to replace the liberalleaning Breyer wouldn't shift the ideological balance of the court, Republicans aren't expending much political energy opposing her.
Durbin and President Joe Biden have been reaching out to some GOP senators personally, promising to answer any questions and give them extended time with the nominee.
The most gettable Republican vote is Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who has already received three calls from Biden and met Jackson for more than 90 minutes on Tuesday. Collins, one of only three Republicans to vote for Jackson when she was confirmed to the circuit court last year, called the meeting “lengthy and very productive.” She signaled that that the nominee is likely to have her vote.
“She takes a very thorough, careful approach in applying the law to the facts of the case, and that is what I want to see in a judge,” Collins said.
Jackson was prepared for the small talk in that meeting, as well, telling Collins in the first few minutes that she got engaged to her husband in Maine.
“She passed that test,” Collins joked to reporters in her office as the two women smiled together for the cameras.
Even if other Republicans don't vote for Jackson, it's clear that she has impressed many of them as she has navigated the awkward ritual of the meet and greet. Texas Sen. John Cornyn praised her experience as a public defender and said she was “charming.” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis noted how prepared she was, a move he said was “wise.” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse shook her hand and congratulated her while the two smiled for cameras under a large buffalo head on his office wall.