The Senate voted to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the newest member of the United States Supreme Court on Thursday, delivering on President Joe Biden’s vow to successfully nominate the first Black female associate justice in the court’s history.
The confirmation of a judge whose nomination has received broad public support nevertheless came through by a narrow vote of 53-47, a tally cut almost entirely along party lines and nearly matching the vote margins of much more controversial nominees.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Mitt Romney (UT) joined their Democratic colleagues in supporting Jackson.
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Jackson, who held the same seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia once occupied by Attorney General Merrick Garland, was long seen as the presumptive nominee for first vacancy on the court under Biden. In addition to fulfilling Biden’s campaign-era vow to “making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court,” the 51-year-old judge has a lengthy résumé as a jurist and attorney that features many of the accomplishments seen as prerequisites for a spot on the court: two degrees from Harvard University, both with honors; a Supreme Court clerkship under the justice she is now set to replace; and eight years as a district court judge following a unanimous confirmation vote in 2013.
Her most recent confirmation before being named to the Supreme Court, however, cut along narrow partisan lines, a preview of the battle to come for her lifetime appointment on the nation’s highest court. Jackson, who was nominated to replace outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer in February following the announcement of his retirement at the end of the court’s current term, will not alter the ideological makeup of a Supreme Court that is widely dominated by conservative justices. But many Republicans fought her confirmation as hard as if she might be the pivotal “swing seat” as the nation’s highest court considers a potential overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Capitol staff crowded into the Senate chamber to observe the historic vote, which was presided over by Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to serve in that office. Several members of the House Congressional Black Caucus lined the Senate floor to observe the milestone firsthand.
In her testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Jackson promised to make the principle of “Equal Justice Under Law”—the words inscribed on the edifice of the Supreme Court itself—“a reality and not just an ideal.”
“I have been a judge for nearly a decade now, and I take that responsibility, and my duty to be independent, very seriously,” Jackson said in her opening remarks before the committee in March. “I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me without fear or favor, consistent with my judicial oath. I know that my role as a judge is a limited one.”
Republican senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee repeatedly interrogated Jackson on cases when she was a criminal court judge that they said demonstrated a pattern of going soft on collectors of child sex abuse imagery, a QAnon-laced attack that fact-checkers have debunked repeatedly. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) earlier this month declared that Jackson, a former federal public defender, would have defended Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the leading Republican on the Judiciary Committee, recently admitted that if Republicans were in charge of the Senate, Jackson wouldn’t even have gotten a hearing.
In addition to being the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice—and only its third Black justice ever—Jackson breaks the mold of justices in subtler ways. A former assistant federal public defender, now the first justice since Thurgood Marshall to have worked in criminal defense, Jackson once worked to reduce disparities in drug offense sentences. In her brief tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals—she was confirmed to her current seat last year—Jackson ruled against former President Donald Trump in his bid to block the release of White House records pertaining to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, writing in her decision that “presidents are not kings.”
Upon her nomination, Biden called Jackson “a proven consensus builder, an accomplished lawyer, a distinguished jurist on one of the nation’s most prestigious courts,” who would “bring to the Supreme Court an independent mind, uncompromising integrity and a strong moral compass and the courage to stand up for what she thinks is right.”
Additional reporting by Ursula Perano
