President Joe Biden announced on Friday the 51-year-old lawyer’s nomination for the Supreme Court. If confirmed by the Senate, she would succeed liberal constitutional judge Stephen Breyer, who is set to step down in the summer.
Breyer, the oldest Supreme Court justice at 83, announced in January that he would be retiring at the end of the current court year in June. This is the first time Biden has been able to appoint a new constitutional judge during his tenure. During the election campaign, the Democrat promised to appoint an African-American woman to the powerful court for the first time in history.
Several candidates checked
In the past few weeks, Biden then examined several candidates. The choice now fell on Jackson, who is currently working at the federal appeals court in the capital Washington. This will not change anything in the Supreme Court majority: Like Breyer, for whom she once worked as an assistant, Jackson belongs to the progressive camp. A clear majority of six of the nine constitutional judges, on the other hand, belong to the conservative camp.
In the US, constitutional judges are nominated by the President and must then be confirmed by the Senate. The appointment is for life. The selection and confirmation of Supreme Court candidates are politically highly contested processes because the Court plays a central role in the institutional structure of the USA.
The Supreme Court decides on the constitutionality of laws and government actions and generally has the final say in legal disputes. This includes highly contentious issues such as abortion rights, gun laws, immigration laws and the death penalty.
behind-the-scenes pressure
For months, pressure had been exerted behind the scenes on constitutional judge Breyer, who had been in office for 28 years, to retire. The background to this is fears on the part of Biden’s Democrats that they will lose their current wafer-thin Senate majority in the autumn congressional elections.
Should Breyer become seriously ill or even die in office in the following years, the Democrats would then no longer have a majority to confirm a successor nominated by Biden. Rather, the opposition Republicans of ex-President Donald Trump could block any candidate.
Like the Republicans, the Democrats currently have 50 senators. In stalemates, however, Vice President Kamala Harris makes the difference in her role as Senate President. That’s why the Democrats actually have a majority – albeit an extremely narrow one. As in the past with other Supreme Court candidates, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation is likely to be very competitive.
Harvard degree and public defense
The 51-year-old was born in Washington but grew up in the state of Florida. The graduate of the elite Harvard University has worked as a public defender at the federal level in the past, representing impoverished clients – an experience that no constitutional judge has had to look back on.
Jackson has served as a federal judge since 2013. She probably made her best-known judgment in 2019, when she inflicted a legal defeat on then-President Trump: she ruled that high-ranking government officials had to comply with parliamentary subpoenas. Trump wanted to prevent this. “Presidents are not kings,” Jackson wrote in her verdict.
Last year she was then promoted to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington. In the Senate, three conservative senators also voted for Jackson. The judge is married to a surgeon and has two children.
There have already been two African American judges in the history of the Supreme Court: Thurgood Marshall, who died in 1993, and Clarence Thomas, who has been in office since 1991.
Source: Nachrichten
