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      ‘Judge Jackson stands on the shoulders of giants’: women of color on a day to celebrate

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      ‘Judge Jackson stands on the shoulders of giants’: women of color on a day to celebrateKetani Brown Jackson becomes the first Black female justice on US’s highest legal body after her confirmation passes 53-47 Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the US supreme court has passed the Senate and she will now become the first Black female justice on America’s highest legal body after being nominated by Joe Biden earlier this year.Jackson’s nomination has been widely praised by women of color, especially after she sustained grueling confirmation hearings at the hands of some top Republicans who seemed dedicated to political points-scoring and whose criticisms often seemed like racist dog-whistling.Here are four women of color talking about Jackson and the significance of her nomination:Kamala Harris, US vice-president“I’ll tell you what I think you know. Judge Jackson is a phenomenal jurist,” Harris said last month in Selma, Alabama, during the 57th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”.Jackson “proves her commitment not only to public service but to equal justice and equal rights”, Harris added.“As she makes history, Judge Jackson, like us all, stands on the shoulders of giants. She and we are their legacy.”Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center“The world demands untold levels of strength from Black women on a daily basis. The perseverance Jackson held close is all too familiar to Black women across this country,” Graves wrote in a CNN op-ed last month during Jackson’s confirmation hearings.“​​We hailed her career and celebrated not only her, but also the work of countless Black women silenced, erased and excluded from the top echelon of the legal profession,” she said, adding: “This will be the legacy of her rise to the supreme court: a young Black girl, one of a generation of Black girls, joyful at the sight of new possibilities for her own life.”Ann Claire Williams, retired US circuit judge of the US court of appeals for the 7th circuitIn a statement on behalf of the American Bar Association’s standing committee on the federal judiciary, Williams wrote: “Judge Jackson has a sterling reputation for integrity. Judges and lawyers who have known her in every capacity uniformly praised her character, calling her integrity ‘beyond reproach’, ‘first rate’, and ‘impeccable’.”“Our extensive review leads us to conclude that Judge Jackson meets the highest standards of integrity, professional competence, and judicial temperament,” Williams continued, granting Jackson the ABA’s highest rating.Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of Boston University School of Law“We don’t only get judged by our actions as individuals, all Black people get judged by our actions,” Onwuachi-Willig said in reference to Jackson’s confirmation hearings. “That’s an enormous weight. Judge Jackson was carrying that weight for hours and hours and hours, and I felt that was a human moment.”“With nearly 10 years of service as a federal judge, experience clerking for Supreme court justice Stephen Breyer and two lower-court judges, and a record of leadership on the United States Sentencing Commission, she will make an incredible supreme court justice,” Onwuachi-Willig also said in a letter, along with more than 200 other Black women law deans and professors, that urged the Senate’s confirmation of Jackson.TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Senate judiciary committee nears vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson

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      Senate judiciary committee nears vote on Ketanji Brown JacksonCommittee vote expected to be evenly split, 11-11, forcing Democrats to ‘discharge’ the nomination The Senate judiciary committee on Monday neared a vote on the historic nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, poised to be the first Black woman confirmed to the supreme court.Following days of interrogation and debate over Jackson’s qualifications, the committee vote was expected to be evenly split, 11-11. That would force Democrats to “discharge” the nomination, delaying but not denying confirmation.Before the vote could take place, the committee adjourned to await the arrival of its 22nd member, the California Democrat Alex Padilla, whose flight to Washington was delayed.A vote to discharge Jackson’s nomination was expected as early as Monday evening. That would set up hours of additional debate on the Senate floor.Democrats and the White House hope to confirm Jackson to the lifetime position on the court before Congress recesses for the Easter holiday on Friday. The 51-year-old was confirmed by the Senate to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit last year with the support of three Republicans.Ketanji Brown Jackson to receive rare Republican vote as Collins says yesRead moreOnly one of those Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, has committed to voting for her again.Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has said he will not support Jackson’s nomination to the supreme court​​, calling her an “activist to the core”, outside the judicial mainstream.Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has not said how she intends to vote, but is seen as one of only two more Republicans, along with Mitt Romney of Utah, who might support Jackson.If confirmed, Jackson will replace the retiring liberal justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she clerked, and would make history as the first Black woman and only the sixth woman to sit on the court in more than 200 years. Her confirmation would, however, do nothing to change the ideological balance of a court on which conservatives outnumber liberals 6-3.In his opening remarks on Monday, Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee’s Democratic chair, praised Jackson’s “impeccable qualifications” and said her experience as a public defender would bring a “missing perspective to the court”.“This committee’s action today in nothing less than making history,” Durbin said. “I’m honored to be a part of it. I will strongly and proudly support Judge Jackson’s nomination.”Durbin also lamented Republican hostility toward Jackson, accusing senators of leveraging “vile” and “discredited” attacks on her record and character.“She stayed calm and collected. She showed dignity, grace and poise,” Durbin said. “It is unfortunate that our hearing came to that, but if there is one positive to take away from these attacks, it is that the nation got to see the temperament of a good, strong person truly ready to serve on the highest court in the land.”Many Republicans used the hearing on Monday to rehash their attacks on Jackson, accusing her of handing down lenient sentences to child sex crime offenders when she was a federal trial court judge, a claim independent factcheckers have said is baseless and lacks context.During her hearings, Jackson forcefully defended her record, telling senators these were among the most traumatic and haunting cases she dealt with and that she did her “duty to hold the defendants accountable”.Republicans also sought to portray Jackson as “soft on crime”, a line of attack dismissed outright by the American Bar Association, which testified that she was strongly qualified for the position.Republicans on the committee appear uniformly opposed to Jackson’s nomination, starting with the ranking member, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who announced he would not vote to confirm Jackson because “she and I have fundamental, different views on the role of judges and the role that they should play in our system of government”.On Monday, Graham again used his time to decry Democrats’ treatment of nominees named by Republican presidents.“If we were in charge, she would not have been before this committee,” Graham said.His point was that Republican control of the Senate would have forced Democrats to put forward a more “moderate” – in his view – nominee. But Democrats saw the comment as a plain-spoken acknowledgment of Republicans’ hardball tactics when it comes to the supreme court, after the GOP refused to let Barack Obama fill a vacancy in 2016 – an act without precedent.Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, compared proceedings on Jackson’s nomination to Festivus, the holiday celebrated on the TV series, Seinfeld.“There’s been a lot of airing of grievances,” Booker said, adding: “I’ve heard things that are just ridiculous.”During more than 30 hours of hearings last month, Jackson pledged to be an independent justice who would decide cases from a “neutral position”. She defended her record while reflecting on her personal story as the daughter of public school teachers in the segregated south.As the 22-member panel convened on Monday, Joe Biden said Jackson would “bring extraordinary qualifications, deep experience and intellect, and a rigorous judicial record to the supreme court.“She deserves to be confirmed as the next justice.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtUS SenateLaw (US)US politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Why are Republican Senators flirting with QAnon conspiracies? Politics Weekly America podcast

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      During the Senate confirmation hearings for Joe Biden’s nomination for Supreme Court justice, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was repeatedly asked about an unfounded claim that originated in the QAnon community. Joan E Greve and Alex Kaplan of Media Matters look at why some in the GOP are turning to a far-right extremist group for attack lines.

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      A sample of Politics Weekly America: Why are Republicans flirting with QAnon conspiracies? – podcast

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      To hear the full episode, be sure to search for and subscribe to Politics Weekly America wherever you get your podcasts.
      During the Senate confirmation hearings for Joe Biden’s nomination for supreme court justice, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was repeatedly asked about an unfounded claim that originated in the QAnon community. Joan E Greve and Alex Kaplan of Media Matters look at why some in the GOP are turning to a far-right extremist group for attack lines

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      Subscribe to Politics Weekly America on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts Let us know what you think of the episode at podcasts@theguardian.com More

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      Supreme court ruling on Wisconsin maps highlights its hostility to voting rights

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      Supreme court ruling on Wisconsin maps highlights its hostility to voting rightsIt’s no secret the court has been hostile to voting rights recently – but what has changed is the ‘velocity’ that it is acting with Hello, and Happy Thursday,In the fall of 2017, I was sitting in the cramped press area at the supreme court as a lawyer named Paul Smith urged the justices to strike down the districts for the Wisconsin state assembly. They were so distorted in favor of Republicans, he argued, that they violated the US constitution. As Smith started to lay out his case, Chief Justice John Roberts cut in and laid out what he feared would happen if the supreme court were to step in and start policing electoral maps based on partisanship.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletter“We will have to decide in every case whether the Democrats win or the Republicans win. So it’s going to be a problem here across the board. And if you’re the intelligent man on the street and the court issues a decision, and let’s say the Democrats win, and that person will say: ‘Well, why did the Democrats win?” Roberts said. “It must be because the supreme court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans. And that’s going to come out one case after another as these cases are brought in every state. And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country.”The supreme court eventually upheld the Wisconsin districts on technical grounds. But in 2019, the court removed itself and the entire federal judiciary from policing partisan gerrymandering. “Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote. He pointed to state courts as one potential forum where litigants could bring claims. Together, those two moments underscore how wary Roberts was of getting the court entangled in redistricting cases, highly politically charged disputes that could pose a serious threat to the court’s apolitical reputation.That’s why it was so stunning to see the supreme court intervene last week over Wisconsin’s new legislative maps. Instead of staying out of a redistricting dispute, the supreme court went out of its way to insert itself into the center of a dispute in one of America’s most politically competitive states.The Wisconsin case that arrived at the supreme court this year was a bit different from the one it considered in 2017. This time around, the state’s Republican legislature was challenging the state legislative districts that the Wisconsin supreme court picked for the state. Even though Republicans would still hold their majority under the new map, lawmakers took issue with the creation of an additional Black-majority district near Milwaukee. They said there wasn’t adequate justification for creating it, and made an emergency request to the supreme court to block the maps.In a seven-page unsigned opinion, the supreme court accepted that request last week. But it went further, using the case as an opportunity to interpret the Voting Rights Act in a narrow way without full briefing or oral argument in the case. Even longtime court observers were baffled.It’s no secret that the supreme court has been extremely hostile to voting rights recently. But what has changed is the “velocity” that the court is acting with, Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, told me.“The supermajority of the conservative justices on the supreme court has become pretty emboldened. They’ve got a narrow vision of the scope of the Voting Rights Act. And they are not being shy about enforcing that as quickly as they can,” he told me. “What’s changed is how much more aggressive they’re willing to be.”That increased aggressiveness may in part be a function of the supreme court’s increased conservative majority. Back in 2017, when the court heard the first Wisconsin case, Anthony Kennedy was the swing justice on a court divided 5-4 between liberals and conservatives. Now, Kennedy is gone and conservatives have increased their majority to 6-3.Experts aren’t just alarmed by what the supreme court has been saying about voting rights, but also the way they have been going about it. The court had embraced an idea recently, called the Purcell principle, that courts should not upset the status quo when an election is near. But the justices have been inconsistent in how exactly it has applied that rule and have not really said how close an election must be before courts can’t intervene.In early February, for example, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito said it was too close to Alabama’s 24 May primary to impose a new congressional map that would have increased Black representation. But in early March, when Kavanaugh made the same argument for upholding North Carolina’s congressional districts ahead of its 17 May primary, Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, said it was not too close.And in the Wisconsin case, state election officials said any ruling that came after 15 March would “increase the risk of errors” as it prepared for its primary election in August. The supreme court intervened nine days after that deadline.“It is a sign that many of the brakes have come off,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas told me. “It’s a sign that the court is increasingly willing to do whatever the court wants to do, procedural constraints and sort of awkward timing nonwithstanding.”Also worth watching …
      Anyone who isn’t in jail or prison for a felony can vote, a three-judge panel in North Carolina ruled on Monday. The decision could affect up to 56,000 people in the state, though election officials aren’t letting people with felonies register just yet.
      Arizona Republicans passed a law requiring new voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, which is probably illegal.
      Ohio voting rights groups are fuming after Republicans did a bait-and-switch to try again and get the state supreme court to approve gerrymandered maps.
      A committee of Georgia lawmakers stopped a proposal, for now, that would have expanded the Georgia bureau of investigation’s ability to investigate voter fraud, among other measures.
      TopicsUS supreme courtFight to voteUS politicsWisconsinRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More