On March 21, eleven Republicans and eleven Democrats began hearings to determine whether to move forward the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. President Joe Biden nominated Judge Jackson to replace Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced that he will step down at the end of the year.
During his campaign for president, Biden announced that, if elected and given the opportunity, he would nominate a black woman to the court. Depending on the results of the confirmation hearings, Jackson could become the first black woman to sit on the Supreme Court.
In his opening remarks, Senator Ted Cruz, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is responsible for advancing or denying the nomination, told Judge Jackson that she would not face the hostile interrogations that previous justices had faced.
Cruz laid the blame for the radicalization of the nomination process on Democrats, even going so far as to recall President Biden’s checkered history in the decades he spent as a Senator apparently blocking people of color and women from the nomination.
“This will not be the kind of character smear that sadly, our Democratic colleagues have gotten very good at,” Cruz said in his opening statements.
He pointed to multiple times that Democrats have apparently derailed Senate nominations, including the variety of tactics used against Judge Richard Bork in 1987 and the accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill in 1991, led by then-Senator Biden.
Cruz further criticized Biden’s votes against Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, along with the partisan filibuster of Neil Gorsuch, nominations he said were “unquestionably qualified.”
The Senator also mentioned remarks Biden reportedly made in 2005 on the CBS News show Face the Nation in which he threatened to use the filibuster to prevent the nomination of Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman who was considered to be on the shortlist for the Supreme Court during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, as well as the Democrats’ filibustering of Miguel Estrada “because he is hispanic,” a revelation that became public after internal memos from Senator Ted Kennedy’s office were leaked to the press.
“Judge Jackson, I can assure you that your hearing will feature none of that disgraceful behavior,” Cruz said. “No one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits. No one is going to ask you with mock severity, ‘Do you like beer?’ But that’s not to say this hearing should be non-substantive and non-vigorous. In this hearing, this committee has a responsibility to focus on issues, to focus on your record, to focus on substance, to do our very best to ascertain what kind of justice you would be.”
Cruz stated that his focus in questioning would be determining Jackson’s stance on what he believes are significant issues, including the First and Second Amendments, abortion, school choice, and criminal sentencing laws.
“So all of those questions are fair game — ‘Will you follow the law? What does your record indicate? Will you protect the rights of every American citizen regardless of race, regardless of party, regardless of views?’ That’s what the focus of this hearing should be.”
The most recent hearings to determine whether the Senate should confirm or reject a nomination have lasted about one week.
While the president bears responsibility for nominating a judge, the process requires the majority consent of the Senate. Historically, thirty-seven nominations have been refused, while 115 nominees have been allowed to sit on the nation’s highest court.