At Tuesday's State of the Union, President Joe Biden will no doubt try to distract from his disastrous presidency by hailing the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court as a "mainstream" pick to the Court. But what really is her judicial philosophy? As Professor Jonathan Turley points out, Judge Brown Jackson has evaded prior questioning about her judicial philosophy:
Liberals want a justice who is willing to expand the meaning of the Constitution without constitutional amendments. President Biden stressed that his nominee must follow a "living constitution" approach, including a broad view of “unenumerated rights.” When asked if she supported such an approach, Childs answered "no." Jackson, in contrast, has been far more obscure and conflicted in her response.
When she was nominated for the district court, Jackson answered "no" to that question. However, when nominated for the appellate court (and widely discussed as a future Supreme Court nominee), she became more evasive and, frankly, baffling in her answer: She told the Senate that she simply did not have experience with such interpretations as a judge.
It was a bizarre response since the question concerned her judicial philosophy. After all, Jackson has a distinguished academic background and a long career in legal practice. She is clearly familiar with this core concept of liberal constitutional interpretation. (Her answer reminded some of us of when Justice Clarence Thomas testified that he really had not thought much about Roe v. Wade.)
Her answer also made little sense since she had no difficulty responding to the question in her prior confirmation. When again pressed on the issue, Jackson's position became unintelligible. She told the Senate that she is "bound by the methods of constitutional interpretation that the Supreme Court has adopted, and I have a duty not to opine on the Supreme Court’s chosen methodology or suggest that I would undertake to interpret the text of the Constitution in any manner other than as the Supreme Court has directed."
As we previously noted, Judge Brown Jackson is the number one pick for leftist "dark money" groups like Demand Justice. Would her hypothetical future decisions on the Court reflect those interests?
HARRIS: "When folks vote, they order what they want, and in this case they got what they asked for...I went off script a little bit." pic.twitter.com/T88cLIumtj
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 28, 2022
Kevin Williamson opined for the National Review:
When judges follow the law as it is written, we have the rule of law. When judges follow their own sensibilities and moral intuitions, then we have a judicial oligarchy. . .
Judge Jackson is thoroughly a product of her class, and, unhappily, she embodies its biases and subscribes to its ideology — if she did not, she would not be Joe Biden’s nominee, irrespective of her ticking the desired race and sex boxes on the job application.
"When judges follow the law as it is written, we have the rule of law. When judges follow their own sensibilities and moral intuitions, then we have a judicial oligarchy.”
— JCN (@judicialnetwork) February 28, 2022
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is squarely in the latter group.https://t.co/9fC5UrXuwF
A majority of voters are unhappy with the agenda pushed by Democrats during the first year of the Biden Administration.
President Joe Biden and the Democrats are not focussed on the issues that matter. https://t.co/bizrR5KIIf
— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) February 28, 2022
Americans will see through President Biden's shallow attempts to use Judge Brown Jackson's nomination to distract from the negative effects of his policies at tomorrow's State of the Union.