Joe Biden Nominates Ketanji Brown Jackson To The Supreme Court

Do y’all remember when President Joe Biden pledged to nominate a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and a bunch of white conservative politicians got their star-spangled Klan-derwear all in a bunch because they all assumed a Black woman nominee wouldn’t be qualified?

Y’all remember—Ted Cruz caucasilly claimed Biden’s pledge was an “insult to Black women. GOP Senator John Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary Committee, suggested that a Black woman wouldn’t know “a law book from a J.Crew catalog,” while Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker claimed Biden’s pick will be a “beneficiary” of affirmative action and former Cato Institute vice president Ilya Shapiro tweeted his assumption that Biden would nominate a “lesser black woman.”

Well, it turns out that gaggle of GOP goofies were just racist AF (I know—shocking) and Biden’s pick for the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court is a perfectly qualified appeals judge who was also a federal trial court judge, meaning chances of her mistaking a law book for a J.Crew catalog are as unlikely as the chances of Cruz growing a beard that doesn’t look like a bunch of used S.O.S. pads clinging to a slice of moldy bologna. 

Anyway, let’s talk about Supreme Court Nominee, the honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Source: KEVIN LAMARQUE / Getty

From Fox 13:

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed in 2021 to the D.C.-based appellate court as a U.S. Circuit Judge, a position Biden elevated her to from her previous job as a federal trial court judge. Three current justices—(Clarence) Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, the chief justice — previously served on the same appeals court.

Whaaah? So at least three Republicans who sit on the Supreme Court right now and are presumably qualified to be there have similar backgrounds to that Jackson? You don’t say.

In fact, even Republican legislators Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski helped confirm her to the appeals court in June by a 53-44 vote.

Fox 13 also noted another connection Jackson has to the GOP reporting that “Jackson is related by marriage to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis,” because her “husband, Dr. Patrick Jackson, is the brother of William Jackson, who married Ryan’s wife’s sister, Dana.”

But anyway, don’t nobody care what Republican she’s somewhat-but-not-really related to. Let’s move on, shall we?

Source: Tom Williams / Getty

Jackson, who was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in Miami, said her interest in the law goes all the way back to when she was in preschool and her father, who eventually became an attorney for the county school board, was in law school. In fact, interest in the legal profession apparently runs in Jackson’s family as her brother, an Army veteran, is also now a lawyer.

As for Jackson, who was a class president and a debate champion at her high school, the 51-year-old attended Harvard, where she met her husband, and she studied government but also studied drama and musical theater and was part of an improv group called On Thin Ice.

Not that we need any more evidence that Jackson is, indeed, more than qualified to sit on the highest court in the country, but from 1999 to 2000, she was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. She also worked for law firms throughout her career and was once a public defender. She was also nominated to serve on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the agency that develops federal sentencing policy, where she “was part of a unanimous vote to allow thousands of people already in federal prison for crack-related crimes get their sentences reduced as a result of a new law,” Fox 13 reported.

Source: KEVIN LAMARQUE / Getty

All of this happened before President Barack Obama nominated her to serve as a federal trial court judge in 2013. He also tweeted his full support for Jackson today.

It’s almost like all of those Republican conservatives of the white nationalism persuasion were loud, racist, misogynistic, and wrong and there are Black women who are as qualified to be a U.S. Supreme Court justice as anyone else.

Go figure.