Joe Biden may occupy the Oval Office, but his Supreme Court choice reconfirms that he is running Bernie Sanders’s administration.
Just about every time Biden has had a choice between acting simply as an old-fashioned liberal and acting as a hard leftist along the lines of the openly socialist senator from Vermont, Biden has gone hard-left. His choice of appeals court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson continues that predilection. It also sides Biden again with the privileged elites of the Democratic Left rather than the less crusading, more practical liberalism of the working rank and file.
To be clear, Brown Jackson is by general agreement a fine person with impressive qualifications. Most Republican opponents will not try to trash her personally or promote ludicrous smears about alleged gang rapes or pornographic movies. Opposition to her should be thoughtful, dignified, and based on legitimate complaints about her public record.
BIDEN NOMINATES KETANJI BROWN JACKSON TO SUPREME COURT
That record, though, is worrisome, in terms both of quality and of ideology. Many critics have noted she has an unusually prominent record of having her decisions reversed on appeal, with even liberal judges joining conservatives in saying Brown Jackson got basic legal principles very wrong. Indeed, a full panel of an appeals court reversed one of her decisions just 11 days ago. In many of these cases, her decisions seemed based more on strained interpretations in service of liberal political positions — for example, against border enforcement — than on the more obvious readings of applicable law.
And as Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has noted, a nonpartisan analyst on the quality of legal writing repeatedly found Brown Jackson’s written opinions to be significantly less impressive than those of recent nominees and of one of the other judges, purportedly more centrist, on Biden’s final “short list” of Supreme Court choices.
Analyst Ross Guberman wrote that Brown Jackson’s writing could be characterized as “plodding, perhaps even painful,” full of “mixed metaphors and turns of phrase [that] clash and clang.” And Whelan wrote that “if someone applying for a clerkship submitted a writing sample of [her] quality, the applicant’s prospects would be damaged.”
Of Biden’s three reported finalists for the high court, all of them liberal to one degree or another, Brown Jackson has a reputation as the most ideologically leftward. She could be seen, then, as yet another sop to the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party — as opposed to the more working-class blacks represented by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, whose endorsement of Biden saved his stumbling presidential campaign. Clyburn was known to support a federal judge from South Carolina, Michelle Childs, who has more experience in daily trial courts and who already enjoys the support of several key Republican senators.
Markedly, Brown Jackson grew up the daughter of a prominent attorney and of a high school principal, and she attended Harvard for both undergraduate and law school. By contrast, Childs grew up in more of a by-the-bootstraps manner with divorced parents, one a police officer and the other a midlevel personnel manager. As her high school’s valedictorian, she earned a scholarship to the University of South Florida and then a degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law. Seen as less an ideological crusader than Brown Jackson, she may not have thrilled conservatives but could have sailed through the confirmation process as a more unifying figure.
Oh, well. For the entire 13 months of his presidency, Biden has proved less interested in unity than in transformational leftism. Ketanji Brown Jackson is his bid to put such leftism on the nation’s highest court.
