Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court will advance to the full Senate floor for a final showdown later this week after all of the Senate’s Democrats and three Republicans voted to discharge the committee deadlocked over the issue. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) announced just before the discharge vote that they would become the second and third Republicans, respectively, to back Jackson’s “historic nomination” to the nation’s highest court, as Murkowski called it. The pair joined Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in breaking their party line, tallying the discharge vote at 53-47 just hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked at 11-11 on the judge’s nomination. Romney, in a resounding endorsement of Jackson as “a well-qualified jurist and a person of honor,” congratulated the judge on “her expected confirmation.”
