Senate Confirms First Black Woman as Supreme Court Justice

WASHINGTON — Ketanji Brown Jackson won confirmation in the Senate Thursday to become the first Black woman to be appointed as a Supreme Court justice.

The 53-47 vote was made possible by three Republicans who crossed over to vote for Jackson. All Senate Democrats voted for her.

Jackson will replace Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who said he would retire when his replacement is confirmed and the Supreme Court’s term ends in late June or early July.

“Here I see someone extraordinarily well qualified, someone who will make the Supreme Court look more like America,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., at a press conference after the confirmation vote.

She will be tasked during the next Supreme Court term to rule on pivotal cases of voting rights, religious exceptions to sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action regulations for college admissions.

Republican leaders repeated their concerns immediately before the vote that Jackson would impose her own will on the rulings instead of following the laws set by Congress. 

They based the accusations on the previous nine years of her rulings as a U.S. District Court judge and a federal appellate court judge in Washington, D.C.

“Her record clearly shows that she does not believe in or act in the limited role of a judge,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said on the Senate floor.

The confirmation fulfills a pledge by President Joe Biden to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court if the opportunity arose. Jackson, 51, could serve on the Supreme Court for decades.

She becomes the 116th Supreme Court justice in American history. They have included 108 white men, four women and two other African Americans.

She watched the vote with Biden in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. She is scheduled to meet with him again at the White House Rose Garden Friday afternoon for a celebration.

“Judge Jackson’s confirmation was a historic moment for our nation,” Biden posted on Twitter Thursday afternoon. “We’ve taken another step toward making our highest court reflect the diversity of America.”

Some senators who voted for her described Jackson’s story as typically American.

“Ketanji Brown Jackson’s improbable journey to the nation’s highest court is a reflection of our own journey,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.

She was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Miami, Florida, as the daughter of schoolteachers. She attended Harvard University for college and law school, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

One of her three clerkships was for Breyer. As a U.S. District Court judge, she wrote more than 600 opinions.

During three days of confirmation hearings, Republicans directed their harshest criticism at the sentences she gave to child pornography convicts. They said the sentences often fell unexplainably below federal sentencing guidelines.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said minutes before the vote that Jackson had a record of “treating convicted criminals as gently as possible.”

Jackson defended her record before the Senate by saying she tried to apply the law to the facts based on the circumstances of each case. She denied being a liberal activist judge.

She sometimes angered supporters of former President Donald Trump with rulings that invalidated his administration’s policies.

In the 2018 ruling of American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO v. Trump, Jackson invalidated provisions of three presidential executive orders that limited the rights of labor unions to represent union members who worked for the federal government. 

In 2019, Jackson issued an injunction against a Trump administration rule to fast-track deportations of illegal immigrants without giving them court hearings. A federal appeals court overturned her decision.

Also in 2019, Jackson ruled that former White House Counsel Don McGahn could not lawfully invoke executive privilege to avoid a congressional subpoena. The House Judiciary Committee was investigating obstruction of justice allegations against Trump administration officials.

Vice President Kamala Harris said after the confirmation vote that she was “overjoyed, deeply moved.”

Tom can be reached at [email protected]