One day after meeting President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would study her “judicial philosophy” ahead of her confirmation process.
“I enjoyed meeting Judge Jackson,” McConnell tweeted on Thursday. “One crucial Supreme Court qualification is judicial philosophy. The nation needs Justices who uphold the rule of law by applying our laws and Constitution as written. I’ll be studying the Judge’s record and views during the vigorous process ahead.”
Jackson, a judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was nominated by Biden Friday to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer when he steps down this year after the current term. In a statement on Wednesday, McConnell said Jackson had published two opinions in her nine months on the D.C. Circuit and that one of her decisions from the district court was reversed unanimously by a three-judge panel.
MCCONNELL: ‘NO QUESTION’ KETANJI BROWN JACKSON QUALIFIED FOR SUPREME COURT
I enjoyed meeting Judge Jackson. One crucial Supreme Court qualification is judicial philosophy. The nation needs Justices who uphold the rule of law by applying our laws and Constitution as written. I’ll be studying the Judge’s record and views during the vigorous process ahead.
— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) March 3, 2022
“I think she’s intelligent, very likely progressive. [The] Senate Republican minority intends to treat the nominee respectfully. I’m not at all interested, for example, in what someone may have written in her high school yearbook,” McConnell told Townhall editor Guy Benson on Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson Show.
But the Republican Senate leader has also called Jackson the “choice of far-left dark-money groups” who support adding seats to the Supreme Court and call the court’s legitimacy into question.
According to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, 10 of Jackson’s 578 decisions as a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia were reversed by the D.C. Circuit, either in whole or in part.
“One of my concerns is that a lot of those cases were ones dealing with Trump regulations, and we saw her overturning many of those regulations, or at least attempting to, in cases where she didn’t really have the judicial authority to do so and later had to be reversed by the D.C. Circuit,” said Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, on Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.
One of the decisions surrounded a 2018 challenge filed by federal employee unions against a trio of executive orders issued by former President Donald Trump over collective bargaining rights. Jackson ruled in favor of the unions, saying the court was able to hear their claims and that most of the provisions in the executive orders conflicted with federal workers’ collective bargaining rights under federal labor law.
A unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit reversed Jackson’s decision, ruling that the unions should pursue their claims through administrative processes.
“That really says to me, ‘I’m concerned that this is someone who’s making political decisions reaching beyond their judicial role,'” Severino said.
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While Jackson does not need support from Republicans to be confirmed as the first black woman on the Supreme Court, as Democrats hold 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaker vote, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin has called for her confirmation process to be bipartisan.
Her confirmation hearings are set to begin in about three weeks. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said his goal is to have her confirmed by the middle of April.
