The following includes editorial content which is the opinion of the writer.
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WASHINGTON, DC- Joe Biden boxed himself into a corner when he decided that his first nomination for a vacant Supreme Court opening had to be a woman and she had to be black.
That certainly eliminated a plethora of overwhelmingly qualified candidates.
Still, there were a number of qualified jurists who fit the bill. Yet, Biden decided to pick probably one of the most radical possible choices for the seat of retiring Associate Justice Stephen Breyer.
According to a piece in
Breitbart, Joel Pollak, Senior Editor at Large paints a disturbing picture of Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom Biden has put forth for the Supreme Court.
She apparently is a proponent of Critical Race Theory, admires the Black Lives Matter movement, and has touted the bogus “1619 Project.” All of this, Pollak proposes, should disqualify her from serving on the United States Supreme Court.
Pollak noted that Jackson’s sentiments about these radical beliefs and ideologies were discovered during a recently discovered
lecture she delivered at the University of Michigan Law School.
These were not the sentiments, he wrote, of a young student but rather were delivered while she sat as a federal judge in 2020, who would be confirmed a year later to the D.C. U.S. Court of Appeals.
For reasons which are unknown, all of this somehow escaped scrutiny during Jackson’s previous confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
However it is one thing to sit as a district judge and perhaps an appeals judge. It is an entirely different matter for a Supreme Court justice to admire philosophies which run counter to the foundation of our republic, since part of their responsibility is to uphold our founding documents, including the Constitution.
Hopefully, and it seems that it is so, Republicans are paying close attention to Jackson’s radical beliefs, which paint her as likely the most radical judge ever appointed to the nation’s high court.
Pollak notes the sheer irony in Jackson’s selection as a SCOTUS nominee, due to Biden’s declaration his nominee was being put forth solely based on their gender and the amount of melanin in their skin, which he notes invokes “the kind of discrimination that the Supreme Court itself has said is unconstitutional.”
Moreover, there are pending
cases due to come before the high court that Jackson would hear as a justice, which makes her views on these topics overwhelmingly important.
And the fact that Jackson admires the
1619 Project raises a number of alarm bells, since the author of that garbage, Nikole Hannah Jones, proposes that the United States was founded upon racism and slavery and is therefore a systemically racist country. That fact alone should disqualify Jackson.
The title of her University of Michigan lecture was “Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement Era and Beyond.” There is certainly not, as Pollak notes, anything controversial inherent in that title; it was clearly an acceptable topic.
Jackson’s remarks, which were delivered in observance of Martin Luther King Day were generally that black women have served on the front lines in the fight for equal rights in the United States, which would hopefully direct the country to adhere to our founding principles. She noted that due to those women, America became a freer country for everyone. Sounds good, right?
Unfortunately, Jackson went off the rails when she claimed that Critical Race Theory and its founder, Derrick Bell were a “source of inspiration,” Pollak wrote.
Bell proposed that America is a fundamentally racist country, with that racism being part and parcel of all of our institutions, claiming that because slavery was prevalent when the Constitution was written, it was therefore acceptable in the founding of our country to engage in racism. Which of course, makes no sense.
Bell posited that only through the redistribution of wealth…aka socialism…could our country be saved from so-called “systemic racism.”
Jackson cited Bell’s book,
Faces at the Bottom of the Well, which she said was “omnipresent” in her home when she was growing up, a book which posited that “America is so racist that we would sell our black citizens to space aliens for gold to pay off our national debt.” Tremendous role model right there.
Then there is the Hannah-Jones program of fiction, the
1619 Project. In the opening essay published in the
New York Times magazine, Hannah-Jones made the absurd, ridiculous, and
easily debunked claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery.
Therefore in her mind, slavery was the “founding principle” of the United States. An overwhelming number of historians have dismissed Hannah-Jones’s claims as fantasy.
Then there is her admiration for Black Lives Matter, an organization that has been marred by allegations of financial malfeasance and whose founder, Patrisse Cullors has somehow been able to leverage into a significant real estate empire.
Jackson said in the lecture that her “favorite civil rights photograph of modern times” was a picture of a BLM protester being arrested by Baton Rouge, Louisiana police at a 2016 march protesting police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
It apparently didn’t enter into the equation that both of those men were shot while armed. And of course, we don’t have to address the violence BLM fomented in 2020 after George Floyd’s overdose death in Minneapolis.
All of this raises concern about Jackson’s judgment and what her judicial philosophy would be if she was elevated to the Supreme Court. As Pollak notes, “we cannot have a Justice who believes the Constitution is racist; who believes America was founded on slavery; or who believes police are guilty until proven innocent.”
About the only thing that can be said is as the court is currently constructed, a potential Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would be in the minority—for now.
There are important questions that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee need to ask Jackson, although it is pretty much a given that Democrats’ questions will be typical hanging curveballs. That’s why it is important for the Republicans on the committee to ask her tough questions and not worry about being labeled as “racist” for simply asking questions that it is important to know the answers to.
“Does she share Derrick Bell’s view that the Constitution is racist? Does she share the 1619 Project’s view on the American Revolution? Does she believe the officers who shot Sterling and Castile are guilty of murder? And—crucially—does she believe the race and gender criteria of her own nomination are acceptable?” Pollak asks.
All of these are important questions.
Also, Jackson’s comments…only two years old…are certainly pertinent to her nomination. Breitbart cites the case of a Trump nominee, Ryan Bounds, who was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2017.
In that case, two Republicans—Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Tim Scott (R-SC)—slammed Bounds for writings he authored…
as a college student…twenty years prior. The essays mocked identity politics and political correctness, yet were characterized as “racist.”
While Bounds apologized for his writings as a young college student, his nomination went down in flames.
However, as Pollak notes, nothing Bounds wrote comes anywhere near the “racial extremism” of Jackson’s role models.
Racial extremism goes both ways, or at least it should. We agree with Pollak.
“If a Republican nominee had to withdraw because of skepticism of racial politics as a student, a Democratic nominee with radical racial views in the present day should not be on the Supreme Court.” [emphasis added]
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