She advocates the separation of church and state and put President Trump in his place with a groundbreaking decision. Ketanji Brown Jackson is now the first black judge to be appointed to the US Supreme Court.
In early April, the Senate confirmed President Biden’s 51-year-old nominee by a vote of 53 to 47, including all 50 Democratic senators but only three members of the Republican opposition. Biden upgraded the election Twitter as a “historic moment” and a further step on the way to reflecting America’s diversity in the composition of the highest court. In the 233-year history of the US Supreme Court, 115 people have served on the Supreme Court, including 108 white and two black men.
One of the tasks of the Supreme Court is to make final decisions on the constitutionality of laws. It also deals with topics such as abortion or the death penalty, which repeatedly provide explosive fuel in political discussions in the USA. The members are elected for life, and the allocation of seats is politically fiercely contested. As the successor to the liberal constitutional judge Stephen Breyer, Ketanji Brown Jakson belongs to the three-strong liberal camp, which is opposed by a majority of six conservative judges.
For the conservatives, however, Jackson’s election marks a bitter moral defeat. Already her hearing in the Senate committee in the run-up to the election was considered by some Republican senators Kulturkampf staged – they failed across the board.
Senator Lindsey Graham asked the candidate urgently about her personal religious convictions and the frequency of her church visits and asked her to indicate the degree of her religiosity on a scale from 1 to 10. Jackson, who had described herself as a “non-denominational Protestant” when asked, reacted calmly and instead of answering referred to Article VI of the US Constitution, which prohibits a religious examination for public office. The public can trust that they make judicial decisions regardless of their private religious beliefs.
Jackson will take office at the start of the new court year in October. After completing her Harvard studies, she had already worked as Breyer’s assistant. She later worked as a public defender for those who could not afford a lawyer, including inmates at the notorious Guantanamo detention center. In 2013, Ketanji Brown Jackson was appointed a federal judge.
It was in this office that she made what was probably her most important decision in 2019, which made the former legal adviser to then President Donald Trump, Don McGahn, forceto respond to a subpoena from a House Committee and testify in Parliament. McGahn was scheduled to testify before the Judiciary Committee about Russia’s possible interference in the US election. Even Trump himself could not free him from this obligation, Jackson justified the decision: “Presidents are not kings.” Two years later she was appointed to the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington.
The initiative reacted enthusiastically to Jackson’s current election to the Supreme Court Americans United (AU)which advocates for the separation of state and religion in the USA. AU-President Rachel Laser praised Jackson as a “bulwark against the ultra-conservative majority of the court”. This is apparently determined not to use religious freedom to protect everyone, but as a weapon against those who think differently.
