If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. Audre Lorde
In her opening statement during the confirmation hearings, President Biden’s historic Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who would replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, began by acknowledging her proud family who sat on the front row behind her as she faced the Senate Judiciary Committee. She paid tribute to her parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, who made her believe her path was clearer because they, and so many others, had faced so many racial barriers. The nominee credited her father for her brother’s, a police officer and member of the armed forces, and her interest in law and public service.
“Speaking of unconditional love,” she said, “I have no doubt that without my husband of 26 years, Dr. Patrick Jackson, by my side from the very beginning of my professional career, none of this would be possible. I love you.”
Overwhelmed with emotions, there was no shame as the renown surgeon wiped away his tears. She spoke on her vulnerability as a mother, not always getting the balance of her career and motherhood right. And to her beautiful daughters, Leila and Talia, she said she hopes they have seen that with hard work, determination, and love, success and happiness can be real. “I am so looking forward to seeing what each of you chooses to do with your amazing lives,” she said.
So, who is this highly credentialed, most admired and respected attorney and jurist who will make history, much to the chagrin of some GOP committee members? North Minneapolis resident, attorney Clinton Collins, corporate council for Geico, and also a Harvard Law School graduate, called the nominee’s credentials nearly impeccable. “Her answers to their bullying and baiting were reflective and very judicious which they very well should be,” he said.
In 2009, former President Barack Obama named Brown-Jackson to become the vice-chair of the United States Sentencing Commission. In 2016, the Obama administration officials vetted her as a potential nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by the death of Antonin Scalia.
On March 30, 2021, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Jackson to serve as a U.S. Circuit Court Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Judge Jackson served as the law clerk for retiring Justice Breyer and learned up close how important it was for a Supreme Court Justice to build consensus and speak to the mainstream of citizens.
“President Biden was going to want to make sure that no one would question the academic credentials of the first Black woman nominee. She went to Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She was a Supreme Court clerk,” Collins said on Conversations with Al McFarlane on KFAI, 90.3 FM last Tuesday.
“If your goal is to get the most prestigious clerkship, you want to clerk for a federal judge. Among the federal judges, there’s a hierarchy. There’s the district court judges, the appellate court and the Supreme Court. The most illustrious path if you want to really burnish your clerkship credentials would be to clerk for a federal district or appellate court judge, and then get a Supreme court clerkship.
If you want to be a federal judge, a Supreme court clerkship, is probably the best credential you can have. If you want to go to one of the big Wall Street law firms, they’ll take you with open arms. And right now, the big Wall Street firms are paying Supreme Court clerks who choose to join their firm $200,000 to $300,000 bonuses to sign up with them because they realize how important that credential is and the contacts that you have as a Supreme Court clerk,” Collins said. “Judge Jackson has those credentials.”
“In at least in the last several decades, there have been certain credentials that have become very important or at least have become the qualifying markers. There are two or three law schools that seem to give you an inside track for these nominations. Harvard Law School, Yale, and to a lesser extent Stanford, but especially Harvard and Yale. Yale is the hardest law school to get into in the country. It’s even harder than Harvard Law School because the class is smaller. The typical first year class at Harvard is 500 students. Yale is half that size. So if you look at who’s on the court right now, at least half of the justices went to Yale Law School and the others went to Harvard law school with the exception of Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent person, who actually went to Notre Dame Law School though, apparently she got into the Ivy league law schools and for other reasons chose to go to Notre Dame,” Clinton Collins said.
But for the first Black woman, you want to make sure that if people are going to come at her, it would not be because they could question her intellect or her academic credentials,” he said.
“For the Republicans to attack her, which clearly they’re trying to do, they’re going to have to do it on ideological lines. They can’t say that she’s not qualified. The woman who not only has excellent academic credentials, she has been a district court judge. She was a federal defender, public defender in the federal system, and now she’s also sat on the court of appeals,” Collins said.
“Professionally, as well as academically, her credentials are above reproach. Which is, from a strategic standpoint, ideal because it forces the Republicans to do what they’re doing, which is taking these cheap political shots to try to attack her from an ideological point of view,” he said
Republican Judiciary members grilled Jackson on the amicus brief she worked on regarding detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina senator, questioned her religious faith and later, stormed out of the hearings after a contentious discussion as to whether the government had the right to hold detainees indefinitely without a trial.
Brown-Jackson’s testimony Tuesday covered issues such as abortion, critical race theory, court packing, and how she would define ‘a woman’. GOP committee members used the platform to attack Democrats, setting out rally points for their 2022 midterm elections by painting Democrats as soft on crime.
“That places the Democrats in a strong position, because they can say to the nation, the real audience, ‘Here is someone who clearly has the intellectual heft and the professional training to be a judge. And the people that are attacking her are doing it for cheap political reasons. It’s not because she won’t be fair. It’s not because she doesn’t have the training and the background. They just don’t like her because of who she is and who she represents. And they fear that she’s going to somehow affect the ideological balance, which really is not going to happen here. The court has six solid conservatives and Justice Jackson is replacing an already liberal voice on the court,’” Collins said.
Collins said the Republicans know Jackson will get confirmed. She needs 51 votes. With 50 Democrats, Kamala Harris as vice president is going to be the deciding vote. “So I think the Republicans are playing for the fall. They are trying to preview their attack lines for the mid-term elections. They’re grandstanding. And people like Lindsey Graham are trying to get their base fired up.”
Cori Bush (D-MO), the first Black Congresswoman in the history of Missouri, , noted that Jackson would become the first federal public defender in the Court’s 233 years and the High Court’s first justice since Thurgood Marshall to have criminal defense experience.
In an emotional opening statement, Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ), the only Black member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he could barely contain his joy in seeing Jackson in the Capitol for her confirmation hearings. “This is not a normal day for America,” he said. “It’s a proud day!”
Angela Rose Myers, co-chair of the Political Action Committee for the Minneapolis branch of the NAACP, said many GOP politicians think irrationally when it comes to what will prove beneficial for all Americans when we remove the biases that block our way to progress.
“In my view,” she said, “the very foundation of American democracy is rooted in exploitation of Black folk. We have White men who are rooted in a White supremacist ideology, who have power over the lives of Black women’s bodies, Black women’s access to reproductive care. How do we take that power back?”
She said, “I hate that this ill-informed, policy making GOP machine has the power of affecting Black people and, in particular, the millennium generation and those generations that will follow.”
“There’s small steps that we can take of just even being better informed. There are people in our community everywhere who are ill-informed. And there’s an industry of misinformation as making sure that we are not well informed. I would say that one easy thing that everybody can do right now, is figure out who your representative is and sign up for their newsletter. So your city council person, your county commissioner, your state House representative, your state Senate representative, your Senator, and your congressperson, your president, get this information. That might sound like that’s 10 people right there, and that’s 10 newsletters, but I’m telling you when it comes to these small issues, and then also these small opportunities, I can’t tell you how many times I got an email from on Andrea Jenkins, when I used to live in her ward, about a community grant that was coming out, about opportunity to sit in and hear a public hearing or testify at a public hearing,” she said.
Myers said following Insight News, and local community newspapers, the Black news, is so important because the points of view they provide.
