Written by: Michael Shalonov
Edited by: Sean Tonra
President Biden intends to leave his mark on the United States Supreme Court by nominating the first-ever African American woman associate justice. Ketanji Brown Jackson graduated from Harvard Law School, became a Supreme Court clerk, and served as a public defender. Jackson would also serve as a District judge and a Court of Appeals judge. Arguably, putting judicial philosophy aside, Jackson is one of the most experienced individuals to be nominated for the high court. Every president in recent history, aside from Jimmy Carter, has enjoyed the privilege of nominating someone to the high court who embodies impartiality along with a piece of their ideology. Democrats have unified behind Jackson to replace an outgoing liberal veteran, Stephen Breyer. Republicans have unified against Jackson, given animosity towards some of her previous rulings and her unclear stance on constitutional originalism. Some senators like Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley have cited the hostility towards the three previous Trump judicial nominees to cast shade on the Biden nominee outrightly. Nevertheless, a select few still embrace bipartisanship and reason over politics, something members of both parties fail to consider. Representing the state of Utah, Senator Mitt Romney has been open to supporting the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson on the premise she will uphold the original tenets of the constitution and will be impartial.
Throughout her hearings, Jackson has stressed her adherence to the constitution, in which she says the document is “…fixed in its meaning…that is a limitation on my authority to import my own policy views” (Biskupic). The spoken line has drawn some praise from center-right Republicans, primarily including Senator Collins, Murkowski, and Romney. Mitt Romney’s signaling of support for the high court nominee is all the more interesting considering his previous position as the 2012 Republican nominee and his genuine distaste towards the Obama-Biden administration’s state of affairs. Still, despite being a constitutional conservative, Romney has decided to back a presumably liberal court nominee given her experience and constitutional embracement over the fact that her appointer is a left-wing President. Romney said, “In her previous confirmation vote, I had concerns about whether or not she was in the mainstream. And having spent time with her personally…I became convinced she is in the mainstream” (Bobic). Concerning the third federal branch of government, the founding fathers intended to maintain a distinction between judicial and political decisions. Romney’s actions support such an ideal. Alexander Hamilton said, “the complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited constitution” (Trueman).
The Supreme Court is tasked with interpreting the constitution in the preservation of equal justice under the law. Ketanji Brown Jackson has not actively assumed either partisan side of judicial philosophy while signaling an open mind going into any case, casting her personal opinions aside. Under the current course, Senator Mitt Romney is ready to support Jackson, given his belief that her qualifications and her valuing of law interpretation over creation will set the high court in the right direction for years to come. Romney’s intake and handling of the nomination process should be a lesson to lawmakers on both sides who choose to be politically aggressive rather than impartially decent in the name of the constitution. The high integrity and respectable career of someone like Ketanji Brown Jackson should not be degraded on the basis of petty, ill-willed politics.
[The views expressed in this article are those of the author and the author alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the first RULR Editorial Board and Rutgers University]
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