Joe Biden promised it, he did it. He chose a black woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. A first. The lucky winner, Ketanji Brown Jackson, has been the favorite from the start. The Senate will still have to formally endorse his appointment. She will replace Stephen Breyer, 83. A judge whom the Democrats pushed to resign to avoid his eventual replacement by a conservative.
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“Presidents are not kings”
Judge at the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, Ketanji Brown Jackson is 51 years old and is the mother of two daughters. Her husband is a surgeon. She knows Stephen Breyer well because she worked with him over twenty years ago. She particularly distinguished herself for having noted in 2019, in a case linked to Donald Trump and his attempt to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, that “presidents are not kings », that they «have no subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose fate they would have the right to control».
Her fate seems somehow linked to that of Trump, since she was also part of the panel of judges which confirmed that the former Republican president might not object to the transfer of documents from the White House to the special congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. A case in which the Supreme Court ruled, disavowing Donald Trump.
An uncle in prison
With Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court, Joe Biden achieves a second historic nomination, following choosing Kamala Harris as vice-president. If the Senate confirms his nomination, Ketanji Brown Jackson will become the first African-American magistrate within the institution. So far only two black men have sat there.
Joe Biden describes her, in a tweet, as “one of our nation’s brightest legal minds,” who will be an “exceptional” Supreme Court justice. She has a different experience than her future colleagues, who often have profiles of prosecutors: Ketanji Brown Jackson was notably a lawyer in the legal aid services in Washington, where she defended defendants without resources.
In her family, she is not the only one to know the penal system well: one of her uncles received a life sentence in 1989, under a very strict law which imposes life following three narcotics offences. An experience that “made her aware of the impact of the law on people’s lives”, according to the testimony of one of her relatives at the Washington Post. She was appointed federal judge in Washington by Barack Obama in 2013. And is related to Republican Paul Ryan, who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
fierce battles
In the United States, appointments to the Supreme Court are very political and are always the subject of fierce battles. Because judges are appointed for life. Under his tenure, Donald Trump managed to impose three judges (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett), further anchoring the highest court in the country to the right, with now six out of nine judges considered rather conservative. Enough to have a considerable influence on major and very sensitive societal issues in the United States, such as abortion, the rights of the LGBT community or even firearms.
If Democrats put significant pressure on Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court’s oldest justice, to resign, it was to ensure that Joe Biden might name his replacement with a still Democratic-majority Senate. with the casting vote of the Vice-President. Because the midterm elections are approaching. Republicans are likely to regain a majority in Congress in November. They might therefore decide to obstruct the candidate of Joe Biden.
The psychodrama of 2016
It was seen. In 2016, the Republicans refused the candidate chosen by Barack Obama – Merrick Garland, the current Minister of Justice – to replace Judge Antonin Scalia, who died in February of the same year. They went so far as to refuse to audition him, citing the approach of the presidential election. There was therefore a long vacancy in the Supreme Court and in the end, it was Donald Trump who was able to impose his candidate, Neil Gorsuch. A scenario that the Democrats no longer want to relive.
Moreover, the very progressive judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist icon, never wanted to leave the Supreme Court on her own, despite discussions with Barack Obama, and when she had recurring health problems. Result: following her death on September 18, 2020, at the age of 87, in the full term of Donald Trump, and less than two months before the presidential election, she was replaced in extremis by a conservative magistrate, Amy Coney Barrett. Candidate Biden was unsuccessful in proposing that the successor to “RBG” be nominated by whoever wins the election. Yet this is what Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have wanted too. “My dearest wish is not to be replaced until a new president has been sworn in,” she told her granddaughter shortly before she died.
