Trust me, Ketanji Brown Jackson is far more qualified to fill Justice Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court than Amy Coney Barrett. And Blacks everywhere should be proud and encouraged in equal measure that she is even more suited for this pioneering role, as the first Black woman, than Thurgood Marshall was as the first Black man. Marshall was confirmed in 1967.
Any fair reading of Jackson’s academic and professional credentials makes clear that she is twice as impressive. More to the political point, though, Republicans will not find anything in her background as disqualifying as Democrats found in Barrett’s.
As iPINIONS argued when Barrett was nominated, her upbringing in People of Praise, a fringe Catholic group with strictures that mirror The Handmaid’s Tale, and her conspiracy with the group to deceive the Senate made her unfit for the bench.
Even so, for Republicans, Jackson is too Black, whereas Barrett was just white.
Former President Reagan won universal praise when he declared his intent to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. President Biden merely followed that precedent when he declared his intent to appoint a Black woman.
Therefore, you’d be forgiven your consternation at the public show Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz have been making of decrying Biden’s decision as “offensive and insulting“. That is, unless you understand the perverse, Trumpian form of reverse psychology motivating them.
It presumes that the more overtly racist you are, the less likely people are to think you are a racist. Because the normal mind would think nobody is that stupid to be so overtly racist. But the effect would be to normalize your racism. This is rather like Trump realizing early on that the more he publicly humiliates men like Cruz, the more loyal they become to him.
But I urge you to tune in to Jackson’s confirmation hearing. Because you’ll see her deflecting their partisan efforts to trip her up like an unflappable teacher schooling an unruly teenager.
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