Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson secured a nomination to the Supreme Court, and she has been meeting with individual senators while waiting for confirmation.
Jackson has been collecting praise from the Democrats, but she also earned a kind remark from an unlikely source — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“I think she’s an intelligent — very likely a progressive,” McConnell said on Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson Show.
“The Senate Republican minority intends to treat the nominee respectfully. I’m not at all interested, for example, in what someone may have written in her high school yearbook,”
McConnell was asked whether Jackson meets the qualifications for the Supreme Court.
“Yes,” McConnell answered. “No question about that.”
In 2016, McConnell refused to hold a vote on a Supreme Court nominee of former President Barack Obama. He told a crowd that year, “One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'”
Evidently, McConnell has changed his tune.
However, he still took issue with Jackson’s failure to speak about court-packing.
“These nominees don’t say much. They’ve all been schooled going back to [the late Supreme Court Justice] Ruth Bader Ginsburg not to really answer much of anything,” he said.
“I did emphasize to her I thought it was one thing she could simply address, and people would welcome hearing, and that’s the same thing that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer said about court-packing, both of whom made it clear that was a bad idea and was attacked — an attack on the integrity of the — of the — of the court and its independence. I didn’t get an answer to that. But I’m sure she would be asked that again in her hearings before the Judiciary Committee.”
Listen here —
NEWS: @LeaderMcConnell discusses his meeting w/ SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson earlier today.
He says he asked her if she could affirm RBG & Breyer stance against court packing. She didn’t answer. I also asked him if she’s qualified for the job: https://t.co/f1CyTZcrJL pic.twitter.com/v1b9L9GiV9
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) March 2, 2022
Other than McConnell, some Republican-appointed lawyers have spoken favorably of Jackson.
“No serious person can question her qualifications to the court and to my mind her judicial philosophy is well within the mainstream,” William Buruck, a lawyer who represented former President Donald Trump’s White House counsel Donald McGahn, told CNN in a statement Tuesday.
“She will adjudicate based on the facts and the law and not as a partisan. Presidents should be entitled to their nominees provided certain levels of competence and qualifications are met; Judge Jackson clearly exceeds that bar,” Thomas B. Griffith, a former judge on Jackson’s current court, wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Griffith was nominated by former President George W. Bush.
“Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is eminently qualified to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Indeed, she is as highly credentialed and experienced in the law as any nominee in history, having graduated from the Harvard Law School with honors, clerked at the Supreme Court, and served as a Federal Judge for almost a decade,” J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge in Virginia, said in a statement obtained by CNN.
Luttig was appointed by former President George H. W. Bush, and he made his name as a mentor to conservative judges. 40 of his former clerks eventually landed clerkships at the Supreme Court. 33 of them clerked for either Justice Antonin Scalia or Justice Clarence Thomas — two rock-ribbed conservatives.
More to the point, Luttig concluded, “With the confirmations of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, the Republicans now have the comfortable majority on the Court that they have sought for four decades. Republicans should vote to confirm Judge Jackson out of political calculation.”
Other Republicans painted Jackson in a more negative light. Sen. Linsey Graham, R-S.C., voted last year to confirm Jackson to a federal appeals court in D.C., but last month he has criticized Jackson as a foot soldier for the far Left.
Graham had been pushing for South Carolina District Judge J. Michelle Childs, but she came under the Left’s fire for working as a labor and employment attorney on the management side.
“If media reports are accurate, and Judge Jackson has been chosen as the Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Breyer, it means the radical Left has won President Biden over yet again,” Sen. Linsey Graham, R-S.C., tweeted last month.
“The attacks by the Left on Judge Childs from South Carolina apparently worked.”
If media reports are accurate, and Judge Jackson has been chosen as the Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Breyer, it means the radical Left has won President Biden over yet again.
The attacks by the Left on Judge Childs from South Carolina apparently worked.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) February 25, 2022
Still, the Senate Republicans seem to be turning down the temperature after a string of contentious battles.
Jackson herself has expressed gratitude.
“My life has been blessed beyond measure, and I do know that one can only come this far by faith. Among my many blessings — and, indeed, the very first — is the fact that I was born in this great country,” she said at a press conference last month.
“The United States of America is the greatest beacon of hope and democracy the world has ever known.”
She is scheduled for a confirmation hearing in the Senate on March 21.
"I must begin these very brief remarks by thanking God for delivering me to this point in my professional journey,” Ketanji Brown Jackson says after Biden intro’ed her as his US Supreme Court nomination. pic.twitter.com/9q0UIBp4jo
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) February 25, 2022
The Horn editorial team