The Patriot Post® · KBJ and the Importance of a Republican Senate

“I’m inclined to vote for judges of the other side, but this choice of Judge Jackson was really embraced by the most radical people in the Democratic movement to the exclusion of everybody else. After four days of hearings and hearings, I now know why the Left likes her so much.”

So said South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on Monday, echoing what must’ve been the sentiment for many of his colleagues who began to see Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s less-than-stellar performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee and her unmistakably soft-on-crime sentencing history, and who refused to give their consent to her nomination.

Unfortunately, it won’t be enough. She’s got the votes. As the Washington Examiner reports:

The Senate voted Monday evening to begin debate on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, setting her up to become the first black woman appointed to the nation’s highest court.

The upper chamber voted 53-47 to discharge Jackson’s nomination from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which earlier on Monday deadlocked 11-11 on sending her nomination to the Senate floor. The successful discharge means that Jackson is on track for final confirmation this week.

All Democrats voted in favor of proceeding to debate the nomination, as did three Republicans: Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine.

The Senate is thus set to vote on Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination by the end of the week, after she required a special full-Senate vote Monday evening to discharge her nomination from the Judiciary Committee. That committee had deadlocked 11-11 on moving her nomination forward, making this the first time since 1853 that the Senate has had to so discharge a Supreme Court nominee.

Jackson is, as has been noted ad nauseam, the first black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court, thanks to Joe Biden’s nakedly racist and condescending selection process. But this bit of history may not have been possible had Biden been a more decent human being back in 2005. It was then that California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman, was on then-President George W. Bush’s very short list to replace the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor, whom Ronald Reagan had appointed as the first woman on the High Court. Hearing of Brown’s candidacy, then-Senator Biden said that if she were picked to replace O'Connor, it “would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered.”

Class act, that Joe Biden. Bush ultimately chose John Roberts to fill the O'Connor vacancy, and we’ve been paying for his squishiness ever since.

Before the Senate’s Easter recess, then, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will become Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She won’t, however, become the first black on the bench, as Politico mistakenly and moronically reported on Monday morning. That honor belongs to Thurgood Marshall, who beat Jackson to the High Court by a mere 55 years.

Jackson, at 50, will likely be authoring leftist decisions for the next three decades or more, and this hammers home the critical nature of Senate control. Had the GOP been in the majority — had the party merely held onto the two Georgia Senate seats it coughed up in that highly suspicious January 2021 special election — it’s unlikely that Biden would even have nominated Jackson. Instead, he’d have likely opted for a less radical, less controversial nominee, such as J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina.

Elections have consequences. Especially crooked ones.