US Supreme Court Discussions

[N.E. Brigand]

I will be very surprised if Ketanji Brown Jackson is not the pick.

I am not surprised.
Biden to nominate Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as first Black woman on Supreme Court

In light of that chart I posted above: Steve Vladeck noted today that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has more judicial experience than current Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts combined had when they were nominated.

Which is not to say that those four justices necessarily were unqualified, only that some rumblings from conservatives about Judge Jackson not being qualified is nonsense

[N.E. Brigand]

Or as CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams noted today:

Imagine a supremely qualified SCOTUS nominee with two Harvard degrees with honors, a SCOTUS clerkship for the justice they'd replace, and two years as a federal judge.

That's Chief Justice John Roberts.

Ketanji Brown Jackson has all of that, plus seven more years as a judge.

Notably, she also was a public defender, and she would be the first former defense attorney on the Court since Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991.

[N.E. Brigand]

Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House and Republican vice presidential candidate (who lost to Joe Biden in 2012):



(Edit: I don't doubt in the least that Ryan's endorsement of Jackson's merits is genuine, but it's also probably worth noting that Ryan and Jackson are related by marriage: Jackson's husband's brother's wife's sister is married to Paul. Double-edit: Rose made the same point just moments before I made the first edit!)

[RoseMorninStar]

Paul Ryan is distantly related to Ketanji through marriage. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s brother-in-law (William) is married to Paul Ryan’s sister-in-law (Dana). They've known one another for quite some time.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Rose made the same point just moments before I made the first edit!)

Great minds!

[RoseMorninStar]

I probably get more Paul Ryan news than most on this site..

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Ginni Thomas acknowledges she attended January 6 rally but played no role in planning it

Justice Thomas won't, of course, recuse himself from consideration of any cases involving the January 6 insurrection.

[RoseMorninStar]

[N.E. Brigand]

Republicans are just aghast that anyone would describe the torture of military prisoners as a war crime.

[N.E. Brigand]

I appreciate those commentators noting that the same Republicans who have a habit of attracting the support of sexual predators (as shown for example in the picture below) are the ones attacking Ketanji Brown Jackson today for supposedly having gone easy on child pornographers.

[N.E. Brigand]

I was glancing at Judge Jackson's Wikipedia page, and specifically at the "Talk" tab where contributors discuss why they favor certain changes, and I noticed this comment:

I've restored a three-sentence passage that was added (twice) by Marquardtika (in revisions 1069342512 and 1069391737) and removed (twice) by H2rty (in revisions 1069363017 and 1069396197):

In 2019, Jackson ruled that provisions in three Trump executive orders conflicted with federal employee rights to collective bargaining. Her decision was reversed unanimously by the D.C. Circuit. Another 2019 decision, this one involving a challenge to a Department of Homeland Security decision to expand the agency's definition of which noncitizens could be deported, was also reversed by the D.C. Circuit.

I've placed this reliable information in its proper context: paragraph 2, about the subject's reversed decisions (rather than paragraph 3, about the Senate committee hearing). –Dervorguilla (talk) 19:33, 21 February 2022 (UTC) 20:25, 21 February 2022 (UTC) 04:24, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

That got me to thinking: why should reversed decisions get more attention in an encyclopedia entry than upheld decisions?

[N.E. Brigand]

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's communications director complained today that the White House didn't provide senators with the pre-trial sentencing reports for criminals sentenced by Judge Brown -- and Republican senators are now demanding that they be provided with those, particularly for cases involving child pornography.

In response, House Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin noted that such reports are usually treated as highly sensitive and confidential, and that providing them would risk re-traumatizing the victims of the child pornographers that Judge Brown sentenced.

But also there's this:

White House Withholds 100,000 Pages of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's Records (New York Times, Sep. 1, 2018)

That would be the Trump White House, and the records in question were from Kavanaugh's time working for the Bush administration, not as a jurist (Kavanaugh had no experience as a trial judge and thus never sentenced anyone), and it is believed by many people that some of those records would prove that Kavanaugh lied in prior testimony to Congress.

(And that was before we even knew about Kavanaugh's personal problems.)

[N.E. Brigand]

In response to a question from Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Judge Brown said she would recuse herself from an upcoming case involving Harvard University: that's her alma mater (both undergraduate and law school) and she's on Harvard's board overseers. She said that indeed she intended to recuse.

But as many others have pointed, Justices Roberts and Gorsuch both graduated from Harvard, Justice Kagan was the dean of Harvard's law school, Justice Kavanaugh taught there, and Justice Sotomayor was the recipient of some special honors from Harvard.

That leaves only Justices Alito, Thomas, and Barrett to hear the case. And Alito is very devoted to his alma mater, Yale University, and thus is unlikely to be impartial toward Yale's archrival. (Thomas also is a Yale graduate, but he says it was a mistake for him to go there.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Brown is not recusing because she went to Harvard, she is recusing because she is currently on the board of overseers. It really isn't much of a comparison, even to Kagan formerly being a Dean of the law school.

[N.E. Brigand]

Sorry to have been unclear: that particular post was actually meant to be a joke. I don't actually think, for instance, that Alito should recuse because he went to Yale.

[N.E. Brigand]

Reporters at Punchbowl News, an outlet which covers Washington, D.C., wrote today that "two Democratic senators on the panel privately raised concerns with us as to whether Jackson had been adequately prepared for the GOP cross-examination on her sentencing of child pornographers."

It's sad but probably true that Brown and the White House vetters should have planned for some Senators to lose their minds yesterday. But as a number of observers are pointing out, those two anonymous Democratic senators shouldn't think of themselves as mere observers. Republicans were given a lot of leeway by Democrats to spout Q-Anon style nonsense with relatively little pushback.

- - - - - - - - -
Meanwhile, as noted in this piece at Law & Crime, one of the Republican's witnesses in Brown's confirmation hearings, Alabama's attorney general Steve Marshall, "refused to acknowledge Joe Biden as the 'duly elected' president" during questions regarding how an association of Republican state attorneys general to which he belongs put out a robocall urging people to march on Washington on January 6, 2021. (And while it's true that such questions are off-topic in this hearing, they do help establish possible bias, at least, on the part of the witness.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

To the extent that I was able to follow the confirmation hearings, I disagree vehemently with the suggestion that Brown was not adequately prepared to address questions about her sentencing of child pornographers.

[N.E. Brigand]

Reporters at Punchbowl News, an outlet which covers Washington, D.C., wrote today that "two Democratic senators on the panel privately raised concerns with us as to whether Jackson had been adequately prepared for the GOP cross-examination on her sentencing of child pornographers."

It's sad but probably true that Brown and the White House vetters should have planned for some Senators to lose their minds yesterday. But as a number of observers are pointing out, those two anonymous Democratic senators shouldn't think of themselves as mere observers. Republicans were given a lot of leeway by Democrats to spout Q-Anon style nonsense with relatively little pushback.

Ted Cruz posing with prominent Republican activist, later confessed child molester, and later convicted child pornographer Josh Duggar:



No, really: when Republicans started implying in this week's hearings that Judge Jackson was lenient on child pornographers, why didn't Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who are now anonymously leaking that they weren't impressed by her response themselves hit back hard, reminding people that Republicans are the party not only of Josh Duggar but of Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Roy Moore, and Denny Hastert, to name four active or recently prominent Republican office holders with sordid histories?

(A quick search indicates that Hastert has only been mentioned once here, so for those who don't know: Hastert served as House Speaker for eight years, longer than any other Republican ever and longer than all but four other people. He was Speaker longer than Nancy Pelosi has been, and unlike her, he held that power for one continuous block of time. Ironically, Hastert only became Speaker because the Republican who expected to be elevated to that position, Bob Livingstone, withdrew from consideration because it had been revealed that he had secretly been having an extramarital affair. And Livingstone was only in a position to become Speaker because the Republican who had that job, Newt Gingrich -- who himself was secretly cheating on his second wife (with whom he had cheated on his first wife) with the woman who would later become his third wife (and the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican) -- stepped down because Republicans lost seats (but not enough to lose control of the House) in the 1998 midterm elections despite, or because, Gingrich and his allies having pushed the impeachment of Democratic president Bill Clinton for lying about his own sexual misconduct. But Hastert turned out to be, as the judge said when Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison for financial crimes, a "serial child molester." Hastert pled guilty to structuring his withdrawals of cash so as to hide how he was paying $3 million to keep quiet the fact that he had sexually abused multiple boys when he was a high school wrestling coach. Hastert admitted to this. And it's not ancient history: it's only been five years since Hastert was released. By that point, Donald Trump was already president -- oh, wait, there's another Republican politician whose history as a sexual predator should always be fair game whenever Republicans try to claim the moral high ground.)

I think Democrats could have shut down Republican pretty quickly yesterday by forcefully reminding them of their perverted recent history, but instead they let them pummel Judge Brown Jackson for having done nothing wrong. And the stories in the media about yesterday's hearings seem to be more about Brown struggling to respond to Republican attacks than about how insane and hypocritical the Republican attacks were.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Sens. Murkokski and Romney have joined Sen. Collins in announcing that they will vote to confirm Judge Brown, meaning that she should get 53 votes. Still a ridiculously low number for such a qualified and non-controversial nominee, but at least genuinely bipartisan.

[RoseMorninStar]

Sens. Murkokski and Romney have joined Sen. Collins in announcing that they will vote to confirm Judge Brown, meaning that she should get 53 votes. Still a ridiculously low number for such a qualified and non-controversial* nominee, but at least genuinely bipartisan.

*emphasis mine
I guess that depends upon what lens you view 'controversial'. It says more about those who refuse to confirm her than it says about her competence and qualifications.