Presidents ordinarily celebrate Supreme Court selections.
On Friday, the Biden White House rolled out its pick to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer – Ketanji Brown Jackson – on, well, a Friday. A day that you bury news, not trumpet it. What’s more, Jackson’s nomination comes in the middle of wall-to-wall coverage of a rapidly intensifying Russian invastion of Ukraine.
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Why now? And not a week from now when the shock of Ukrainian war images begins to wear off? Breyer isn’t going anywhere until the end of the SCOTUS 2021-2022 term which is still months away. A hypothetical GOP Senate majority coming out of the midterms wouldn’t take power until January. There’s no urgency.
You can argue he’s trying to change the subject, but that would be extremely naive even for this administration.
I think the Biden Administration knows it’s got a tough job ahead.
Jackson is a darling of the far-Left. Check out her Senate questionaire; she isn’t just an Obama donor but she also worked for Obama’s presidential campaign as a poll monitor. She donated to Hillary, too.
As a federal district judge, she shot down Trump executive orders (only to be unanimously reversed by the D.C. Circuit). She’s actually been reversed a lot which can be a red flag for judges. Her rulings include stopping the Trump Administration from expanding its program to deport illegal aliens, and she even gained Leftist kudos for refusing to use the words “alien” and “illegal” in her court decisions.
Here’s an interesting one: in 2015, she sides with Hillary Clinton aide Phillipe Reines and, in so doing, helping him avoid needing to explain why he utilized a private email address to perform official job duties.
Prior to taking the bench, she Jackson represented Guantánamo Bay detainees including a Taliban intelligence officer. She also joined an amicus brief filed by pro-abortion organizations arguing for an anti-First Amendment “buffer zone” surrounding U.S. abortion clinics.
All of that is just the tip of the iceberg, Save Jerseyans.
She’s not going to be an easy sell in a closely-divided U.S. Senate, and polling shows a strong majority of Americans opposing Biden’s expressed litmus test (that the new SCOTUS pick needed to be a black female trumping all other factors).
This might be a rare case where the White House would be happy for Americans to remain distracted for as long as possible.
