Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Appeal To Conservative Family Values & Other Republican Ideals
The Republican’s negative reaction to the nomination of Judge Brown Jackson is confusing because she epitomizes conservative family values and closely held law enforcement ideals
With some Republican senators releasing statements stating their intentions to vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court of The United States (SCOTUS) it is clear that she will be confirmed with some measure of bipartisan support. What is unclear is why there are Republican senators, like Lindsey Graham, who will not vote to confirm her when she in fact espouses so many conservative ideals and has not demonstrated any show of being a so-called ‘far left radical’.
Since the failed nomination of Robert Bork in 1987, the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice has become more of a public political spectacle than ever before. In the 35 years since then, the process of nomination to confirmation has become more a public performance than a process that seeks to determine the suitability of a person to serve on the highest court in the United States. This era colors and shapes every step of the nomination process, from how the nomination is announced by the President, the remarks given by the nominee, the clothes they wear and the line of questioning by the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The intense public scrutiny of the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice means every word said in the public domain by either the President, the nominee or Senators is carefully hand picked to suit a particular purpose. With this in mind, it is important to look closely at what President Biden and Justice Brown Jackson chose to say during the nomination announcement, the opening remarks of the nomination hearings and the aesthetic appearance of the nominee.
Judge Brown Jackson is a black, dark skin-tone woman with kinky hair and as far as we know she is a descendent of America slaves who grew up working class in Florida. There is nothing about these identity markers that indicate she is or could be part of the ‘far left’ or that she hold any radical views. It would only be in what Judge Brown Jackson has said and done in the public domain that can be used to spread the message that she is either a radical or a far left extremist.
Both Democratic senators and the nominee herself excelled at debunking the idea that she is a radical leftist. Republican senators brought up her sentencing history of sex-crime offenders as a show that she is ‘not tough on crime’ which is supposed to be a marker that she is a far left liberal as many leftists are known to be pro-prison abolition and are proponents of criminal reform. Democratic senators and the nominee demonstrated during the hearings that the Judge’s sentencing of sex-crime offenders is in line with that of other judges and Republican-appointed judges. With that being dealt with, there are no markers or identifiers that Judge Brown Jackson is by any means a liberal.
Her career history as a public defender being used as a tool to mark her as a ‘not tough on crime liberal’ is entirely bizarre. Republican senators sparred no bars in questioning the nominee about why she chose to defend ‘terrorists’ and ‘murderers’ and there was a special focus on her role as defense counsel for Guantanamo Bay detainees. The SCOTUS, which the Judge is nominated to sit, holds that the Constitution gives anyone accused of a crime by the government the right to have legal representation. The provision of a defense counsel, by the State, to an accused person is a fundamental tenant of any functioning democracy and certainly of the United States Constitution, a constitution that many Republicans and conservatives claim to defend. Why is it then that Judge Brown Jackson’s role in this fundamental constitutional tenant is used as a brush to paint her as a far left liberal?
Republican senators and many others in conservative media aimed to use Judge Brown Jackson’s role as defense attorney to Guantanamo Bay detainees as a disqualification for her ability to serve on the SCOTUS. It cannot be that her role in upholding the Constitution — by providing a zealous defense to her clients — is a disqualifier for her to sit on the bench of the highest court. As a matter of fact, it is a show to her commitment to all provisions of the constitution. It is not surprising though that a committee full of former prosecutors would take shots at a former public defender.
There was an opportunity, missed by both the nominee and Democratic senators to address a key point in this line of questioning. Republican senators continuously referred to how the judge defended ‘terrorists’ and ‘murderers’ and it seemed no one took this opportunity to clarify that at the time when Judge Brown Jackson was allocated majority of these cases, these were accused persons who had not yet been convicted of a crime. This was an important opportunity to reinforce a constitutional idea that is often left forgotten (especially when the accused person is black or brown) that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty and the senators had no business labelling accused persons/detainees as ‘murderers’ and ‘terrorists’ when they had not in fact been convicted.
A tool that the White House and the nominee choose to employ to illustrate that she is not in fact ‘light on crime’ are her family members who are in law enforcement. There is no dispute that when the nominee was being prepared for the hearings, both her team and the White House knew that she would be questioned about her history as a public defender. It is not surprising then that in her opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee she spends a considerable amount of time talking about her brother and uncles who are in law enforcement and her brother who enlisted to serve after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Her brother who serves in law enforcement, her uncles who were cops and the brother who served in the military are all presented as evidence that the judge does in fact respect law enforcement, has no negative feelings towards the cops and actually is in full support of a police state. The thinking is — there is no way a Fox News pundit can accuse her of supporting defunding of the police if her own close family members are cops. It does not seem as if this worked as many a conservative media personality continued to push the idea that Judge Brown Jackson is in fact ‘soft on crime’ relying solely on dis-information regarding her sentencing history.
The Democratic senators and the nominee herself could have dealt with these baseless accusations without appealing to conservative family values and other conservative ideals.
Judge Brown Jackson is a cisgender woman who is married to a cisgender man and they are a heterosexual couple. The pair were college sweethearts who met at Harvard and have been married for over 20 years. Her husband, Dr. Jackson, is a medical doctor and the two are an interracial couple. They have two teenage biracial daughters and Judge Brown Jackson in her opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee mentioned that her most important role is that of being a mom. She also spoke about her parents, who have been married for more than 50 years and who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps when her father obtained a law degree in his adult years thus elevating the socio-economic status of the Brown family. Judge Brown Jackson’s family sounds like a story straight out of a novel on American exceptionalism.
Purely from an identity point of view, there is nothing about Judge Brown Jackson that would make her unappealing to conservatives. Liberals and Democrats are constantly bashed as being the party of identity politics. If Judge Brown Jackson was unmarried, a single parent with three children, did not go to Harvard and was openly queer there would be a very different reaction to her nomination to the SCOTUS bench from conservative media — how would this then not be a focus on identity politics? From an identity perspective, the nominee fits very perfectly into all conservative American ideals of the nuclear family and upward social mobility.
Turning to her judicial philosophy, which is probably the most important consideration, there are still no indicators that Judge Brown Jackson takes a liberal approach to the law and the Constitution. When questioned about her legal philosophy, the nominee started out by saying she does not strictly apply originalism or the idea of a living constitution. She claimed her legal philosophy is applying the facts before her with the relevant case law and using that to arrive at her decisions. When brought with the peculiar nature of the SCOTUS being the last court that can decide on a matter and that in certain cases there may not be precedent to use to arrive at a decision, Judge Brown Jackson answered that originalism seems to be the legal philosophy that has been adopted by the SCOTUS and she has no intention of deviating from that.
Originalism is a legal philosophy that guides that the Constitution should be interpreted using the meaning of the words at the time when the words were written. Bearing in mind that the Constitution was written by a ruling class of white men who were staunch capitalists in the 1700s, it is no wonder that conservatives are the biggest and potentially the only proponents of originalism. In addition to that, Judge Brown Jackson will serve in a conservative majority court, whatever liberal ideologies she may hold will only be good for dissenting opinions because she will not be able to sway the court.
A close look at the nomination of Judge Brown Jackson and the spectacle that has been her nomination hearings leaves one struggling to figure out why the Republicans don’t like her given she espouses so may conservative ideals and why the Democrats are working so hard to sell her to the other side of the isle by highlighting her appeal to conservatism. It is understandable that her being confirmed with bipartisan support lends some modicum of credibility to her appointment to the bench but the Democrats did not have to feed into the ideals of nuclear family values, upward social mobility and multi-racialism to get her confirmed.
On just the strength of her record as a public defender and judge on the lower courts, Judge Brown Jackson could have been confirmed without parading her interracial nuclear family, parents who’ve been married for more than half a century and family members who serve in law enforcement,
