Chip Somodevilla is a photographer.
Supreme Court confirmations are part of the culture wars. The Senate voted 53-47 to confirm Jackson to the court on Thursday, and it took just six weeks for her to be confirmed. Jackson was accused of giving light sentences to child pornographers, supporting teaching critical race theory in secondary school, and trying to let dangerous criminals out of prison, but there was no evidence for that.
We can expect that from Supreme Court confirmations, even when the stakes for the court are very low. For the past six years, as Republicans refused to hold a hearing for former President Barack Obama's last Supreme Court pick and then ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, narrow majority confirmed justices have been the rule. The first Black woman to be nominated to the court by a Republican, and the fact that she won't shift the court's ideological balance, is noteworthy. Lindsey Graham said that if his party had been in control, Jackson wouldn't have gotten a hearing.
All of this shows that Supreme Court confirmations are very contentious even if control of the court is not at stake. Unless the president's party is in charge of the Senate, new Supreme Court nominees will not make it onto the court.
From the roll-call vote, the partisanship of Jackson's Supreme Court nomination was obvious. All 50 Democratic senators voted for Jackson, even the two who voted against the party on other issues. This shouldn't surprise us at all. Jackson was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year. No Democratic senator has ever voted against one of Biden's federal judicial picks.
The real question going into Jackson's confirmation was if she would get any Republican votes. Three Republicans have voted for a majority of Biden's federal judicial nominees so far. Three Republicans voted for Jackson's appeals-court nomination.
Two of the three who voted to confirm Jackson to the Supreme Court were moderate members of the Senate GOP caucus. The most interesting aspect of Murkowski's decision was that she is facing a tough reelection campaign this year against conservative Kelly Tshibaka, who has the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. In Alaska, a new primary election system that all candidates, regardless of party, run on the same ballot and the top-four finishers go on to a ranked-choice general election has largely eliminated the need for Murkowski to run to the right.
It wasn't Graham who voted against Jackson, but a third Republican who voted for her. Romney has voted for just 23 percent of Biden's federal judicial nominees. It was surprising that he voted against Jackson for the court of appeals, the last time a senator voted to confirm someone to the Supreme Court who they had voted against for a lower court was in 1994. 1
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The three Republican yea votes were a drop in the bucket compared to the 47 Republican nay votes. A pattern of Supreme Court nominations becoming more partisan is related to the mostly party-line vote. Most senators voted for a Supreme Court nominee if he or she was qualified. Most opposition-party senators voted against Supreme Court nominees after Justice Samuel Alito was nominated.
Republicans did not just express their opposition to Jackson through their votes. During her confirmation hearing, some members of the GOP tried to paint her as a dangerous person who was soft on crime, because they believed that babies are racist.
Two of the most vocal opponents were Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn. Cruz used Jackson's status as a board of trustees member at Georgetown Day School to question her views on what he referred to as critical race theory, which is typically not taught in K-12 education. On the second day of Jackson's hearings, the GOP's official account joined the scrum, posting a Gif with her face next to her initials, but it was scratched out and replaced with a new one.
The hearings did not end the GOP's resistance. After learning that three Republicans would support Jackson's confirmation, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene made a baseless accusation that the offending senators were pro-pedophiles.
We live in a culture-war era.
The Republican Party's choice to paint Jackson as an inherently bad person pulls from a tried-and-true playbook that seeks to fuel existing white fears about perceived threats to the status quo. Jackson's confirmation process was not the first time Republicans used a Black bogeyman torile up their base. When Thurgood Marshall was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1967, he faced similar attacks from Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. Jackson's reputation as a federal judge who has gained wide respect in legal circles was still far from what she was forced to answer.
This seat is a relatively low-stakes one to fill. Jackson's presence won't change the outcome of the cases that have to do with abortion, gun rights, voting restrictions and so on. She'll be a reliable liberal vote, but she's replacing another Democratic appointment so the fundamental balance of the court will remain the same. There will still be a six-justice conservative majority, giving Republican appointees a lot of latitude to push the law to the right. Jackson will probably write a lot of dissents as the newest member of the three-justice liberal minority.
Going into Jackson's confirmation hearings, it seemed possible that some Republicans might use it as an opportunity to put on a show of bipartisanship since they had little to lose. Jackson's confirmation vote is the latest sign that the Supreme Court nominees will only be confirmed if the president's party controls the Senate.
The research was contributed by Bycoffe.
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