Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was still undecided on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court on Sunday, noting that she declined to object to expanding the nation’s highest bench.
McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, made the comments after being asked on CBS’s Face the Nation about President Joe Biden’s history-making nominee, including his previous statements praising Jackson for her intellect and qualifications. The senator, who voted against the judge when she was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last June, began by discussing what the two spoke about when they met earlier this month, saying he asked Jackson “to defend the court” by opposing “court packing,” or increasing the number of justices on the bench.
“She wouldn’t do that,” McConnell continued without specifying if she took any position on the matter. “So, in the meantime, the [Senate Judiciary] Committee will ask her all the tough questions. I haven’t made a final decision as to how I’m going to vote.”
McConnell, who is the highest-ranking elected Republican in office, pointed out how Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg both opposed packing the court, adding that it “would have been an easy thing for [Jackson] to do to defend the integrity of the court.”
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Still, he called it “a very good conversation.”
Asked if he could be persuaded to vote for Jackson, the first black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court, McConnell would only commit to watching the hearings and seeing how she performed.
“I’m going to listen to the evidence. I’m going to listen to the hearings,” he added. “And by the way, she’ll be treated much better than Democrats typically treated Republican nominees like Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. It will be a respectful deep dive into her record, which I think is entirely appropriate for a lifetime appointment.”
It was under McConnell and then-President Donald Trump that Republicans confirmed three justices to the court, establishing a 6-3 conservative majority that will is expected to last for decades. In response, a growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers began supporting efforts to reshape the federal judiciary by expanding the court from nine to 13 justices.
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, then-candidate Biden said multiple times that he did not support packing the court, vowing that Democrats would “live to rue that day.”
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Facing pressure from the Left following a few months in office, however, the 45th president signed an executive order last year creating a commission to look into the matter. The commission would be “comprised of a bipartisan group of experts on the Court and the Court reform debate,” the White House said at the time.
Republicans and legal purists have decried the idea, warning it would undo the Supreme Court’s historical insulation from politics.
