Ketanji Brown Jackson to be first Black woman to sit on Supreme Court

[Bobref]

CNN says President Biden will elevate Judge Brown from the DC Circuit to SCOTUS. Her confirmation is a foregone conclusion, even if the Senate splits strictly along party lines. It will be interesting to watch how the Republicans who cried “foul” when partisan politics reared its ugly head during Justice Barrett’s confirmation hearings handle this. Because on paper, her qualifications are very impressive: federal public defender, private practice, federal district judge, federal appellate judge. 

Keep in mind, though, that replacing the retiring Justice Breyer, a liberal, with another liberal, is unlikely to affect what is perceived as the 6-3 conservative majority on the Court.

[DE]

Is she qualified?

[Bobref]

15 minutes ago, DE said:

Is she qualified?

She is very well-qualified. But she is probably somewhere to the left of where RBG was on the political spectrum. She was one of Justice Breyer’s clerks early in her career. Her’s is a Supreme Court track if I’ve ever seen one. But a lot of people will ignore qualifications in favor of the “correct” political leanings.

[DE]

2 minutes ago, Bobref said:

She is very well-qualified. But she is probably somewhere to the left of where RBG was on the political spectrum. She was one of Justice Breyer’s clerks early in her career. Her’s is a Supreme Court track if I’ve ever seen one. But a lot of people will ignore qualifications in favor of the “correct” political leanings.

Then who cares?

[Bobref]

5 minutes ago, DE said:

Then who cares?

Do you think her confirmation vote will be unanimous? I don’t.

[DE]

7 minutes ago, Bobref said:

Do you think her confirmation vote will be unanimous? I don’t.

Oh, hell no.  Idiots are everywhere.

As MMM @Muda69says over, and over, and over.....2 sides of the same coin.

Not to detract from this thread, but that is what intrigued me about Trump, when he ran and won.

I just wish POTUS Biden didn't have to use "identity politics" when Justice Breyer announced he was retiring or when he chose VPOTUS, Kamala Harris.

[DE]

It will likely unfold the way it did when Clarence Thomas was going through his hearings.

Wonder if there will be any future presidents in the panel "grilling" Judge Brown, the way Biden did to Judge Thomas?

[Muda69]

Is Ms. Brown-Jackson the best judge, from across the entire country, who has aspirations to become a Supreme Court Justice?

 

[Bobref]

2 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Is Ms. Brown-Jackson the best judge, from across the entire country, who has aspirations to become a Supreme Court Justice?

 

I don’t know that there is any metric for determining that. She certainly checks all the boxes for intellectual rigor and relevant experience.

[swordfish]

On 2/25/2022 at 4:51 PM, Bobref said:

I don’t know that there is any metric for determining that. She certainly checks all the boxes for intellectual rigor and relevant experience.

Correct.  And she checks the other 2 (racist and sexist) boxes our current POTUS promised to check.  Not that immediately (without any regard to anything else) carving the long list of qualified candidates down to only those of a certain skin color and gender is bad thing - right?

[Muda69]

SCOTUS And Affirmative Action: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/scotus-and-affirmative-action/

Quote

Setting Ukraine aside for a moment: Joe Biden has abandoned the pursuit of a race-neutral society.

In choosing Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearings begin today, as his Supreme Court pick, Biden made it the policy of the United States to select jurists for its highest court on the basis of race. He stated that most clearly in his announcement that it was not character or skill, but race and gender that would be his starting points as he chose a replacement for Justice Stephen Breyer. It was a stunning denunciation of ideals Americans have been told to strive for since the Civil War.

 

There are plenty of people alive today who remember placards noting segregated toilets and white-only waiting rooms. Imagine those people realizing the signs are back, albeit turned on their heads: In 2022, white jurists, to say nothing of Chinese American or Hispanic jurists, must atone for the sin of slavery. To insist this Supreme Court nominee be of a certain race is to admit we are not all created equal, once and forever.

Here’s why discrimination disserves the United States. Of the 1,395 sitting federal judges, just 56 are black women. Only 13 have served at the appellate-court level, one step below the Supreme Court. Assume some of those women are too moderate for Biden, and you are left with a tiny handful of people who even meet Joe’s minimum qualifications. Why would anyone want to so dramatically limit the pool of candidates for such an important job? Is diversity really more important than finding the best jurist to decide critical questions for all Americans? Aren’t we trying to get past the point where a person’s having a certain skin color was the metric of their success?

One judge who reportedly counted among Biden’s top three candidates was Leondra Kruger, who would have been the first person in more than 40 years to move from a state-level court to the Supreme Court. The question of whether someone with her credentials would have even reached the final stages were she not a black woman has an obvious answer.

The thing is, Joe Biden is no crusader. He is a pandering politician. It was exactly two years to the day before he announced Ketanji Brown Jackson as his Supreme Court pick that Biden, on the debate stage in South Carolina days before a primary he could not afford to lose, first made his pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. Biden cynically announced his pick in the midst of the Ukrainian invasion to fit it into the final hours of Black History Month.

As a panderer, the 2022-version of Joe Biden lies about being arrested during the civil-rights movement, while the 1960s-version would not have been caught within miles of a demonstration. Biden of course follows others down this cynical path, like Hillary Clinton, who helped pass a crime bill that led to the incarceration of scores of black youths and turned around to do an Amos ‘n Andy accent in Selma as she sought the black vote.

Biden has a long history of racism, including referring to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Anyone remember Biden’s treatment of Anita Hill? Or maybe Kamala Harris’ campaign for president, when she blasted Joe’s racism as having personally impacted her as a young girl? Democrats’ flexibility is only outdone by their hypocrisy.

And hypocrisy runs deep in the American fabric, notably in the case of affirmative action. Affirmative action, which the Supreme Court strained to declare constitutional, allowed a nation that pretended to strive toward equality to instead enact the opposite, by upholding separate standards based on skin color.

The hypocrisy began with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 Supreme Court case that held that a university violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if it made admissions decisions on the “definite and exclusive basis” of race. That bit about “definite and exclusive basis” was crucial—race could be a criterion, but just not the only one.

The Court ruled that a university’s use of racial “quotas” in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school’s use of “affirmative action” to accept more minority applicants was constitutional. In this case, the university’s offense was being too clear; the University of California explicitly held 16 out of 100 admission spots exclusively for black students instead of just putting its thumb on the scale and—presto!—filling 16 out of 100 slots with black students.

In 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy, which used racial preference to promote diversity. Black applicants were admitted under different standards than members of every other group. The fudge was again to say that affirmative action is constitutional so long as it treats race as one factor among many, and does not substitute for individualized review of the applicants.

The Court wordsmithed its way into declaring decisions based on race constitutional so long as the goal was diversity (good) and not whitewashing (bad). It did so even as it said, at exactly the same time, that racial-quota systems are always “odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.”

But Grutter in 2003 came with an interesting addendum: Affirmative action was supposed to be a short-term, temporary policy, while society worked out the larger issues. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously stated, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest in student body diversity.” Some 19 years in, how’s that working out?

There have been challenges to affirmative action in both schools and workplaces over the years. There are two such cases now before the Supreme Court—Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Collegeand Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The current, more conservative court, may see things differently, but to date, the Court’s answer has always been the same: Racial discrimination that favors black applicants is constitutional, as long as you use nice words like “race is a factor” and not nasty ones like “No Irish Need Apply.”

The irony is that Joe Biden’s decision to restrict his pool of Supreme Court candidates to black women would be unlikely to meet the Supreme Court’s own tests for affirmative action in academia. Biden bypasses the Court’s basic rule—race can only be one factor among many, not the decisive one—in favor of a straight-out-of-Birmingham announcement that he would only consider candidates of one race for the job. Biden’s decision clearly violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits making employment decisions because of an individual’s skin color, national origin, sex, religion, or race in almost all cases. It is almost always illegal to give an applicant an advantage solely because of race. Except, apparently, if you’re Joe Biden.

No one will challenge President Biden. A Georgetown law professor who dared raise concerns about Biden’s approach found himself suspended. Barack Obama, who previously said “affirmative action becomes a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society,” has been quiet about Biden’s criteria.

Race was once used to exclude people from schools and jobs. America now selects people by race in the cause of eliminating racism. We ignore John Roberts dictum that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Simply spinning the color wheel does not create diversity. If Biden truly wanted a diverse Supreme Court, he might try to pull a few more judges out of non-Ivy League law schools. Ketanji Brown Jackson went to Harvard, after all.

But let’s not go too hard on Joe Biden. He just said the quiet part too loud. “Separate but equal” when it harms black Americans is bad and unconstitutional. “Separate but equal” when it helps black people in academia, the workplace, and the Supreme Court is just fine. Biden doubled down on the worst sin of Jim Crow: insisting that a person’s color matters. That’s racism. There’s no other word for it.

Agreed.

[DE]

20 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

SCOTUS And Affirmative Action: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/scotus-and-affirmative-action/

Agreed.

Democrats being racist, yet again.  Color me shocked.  

[DE]

This lady has proven to be VERY weak on her rulings regarding child pornography charges. 
 

Senator Hawley explained this today. 

[Muda69]

14 hours ago, DE said:

This lady has proven to be VERY weak on her rulings regarding child pornography charges. 
 

Senator Hawley explained this today. 

Another viewpoint:

https://reason.com/2022/03/18/josh-hawley-absurdly-suggests-that-ketanji-brown-jackson-has-a-soft-spot-for-child-predators/

Quote

After President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court, Reason's Damon Root noted that she "has shown admirable judgment in criminal justice cases." One especially telling example is Jackson's handling of people charged with possessing or sharing child pornography, who face absurdly long sentences under federal law even when they have never committed any offenses involving contact with a victim.

Questioning those sentences is politically perilous, since people tend to erroneously assume that anyone who looks at such pictures is a current or future child molester. Yet as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Jackson frequently imposed sentences below the range recommended by federal guidelines. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), a former Missouri attorney general, thinks those decisions reveal an "alarming pattern" of "sentencing leniency for sex criminals," whom he equates with "child predators."

Hawley has no idea what he is talking about. His mindlessly punitive attitude elides crucial distinctions and ignores the fact that many federal judges agree with Jackson that the recommended sentences for possessing child pornography are frequently excessive.

 

Jackson, who is currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) from 2009 to 2014. During that time, Jackson recognized that people caught with child pornography do not necessarily pose a threat to public safety. Hawley cites a hearing at which Jackson said she had mistakenly "assumed that child pornography offenders are pedophiles" and was "trying to understand this category of nonpedophiles who obtain child pornography."

While Hawley implies that Jackson's interest in this subject is clearly crazy, it is consistent with research that underlines the importance of a distinction that Hawley ignores in his haste to score cheap political points. As Karl Hanson, a senior research scientist at Public Safety Canada and a leading expert on sex offenders, told me more than a decade ago, "there does exist a distinct group of offenders who are Internet-only and do not present a significant risk for hands-on sex offending."

Recidivism research supports that observation. A 2021 USSC study, for example, tracked 1,093 nonproduction child pornography offenders who were released from prison in 2005. Three years later, it found, 3.3 percent had been arrested for a "non-contact sex offense" (which would include possession of child pornography). Just 1.3 percent had been arrested for a "contact sex offense." Even allowing for crimes that were not reported, these finding suggests this category of sex offenders is far less dangerous than people commonly imagine.

Hawley is completely uninterested in such findings. He even faults Jackson for referring to "less-serious child pornography offender[s]," a complaint that bizarrely implies there are no differences among such defendants that might be relevant to the punishment they receive. As far as lawmakers like Hawley are concerned, there is no such thing as an excessively severe sentence for possessing child pornography.

In 2003, the USSC notes, "Congress directly amended the guidelines to add new sentencing enhancements and created new statutory mandatory minimum penalties." As a result, "the underlying conduct triggering such enhancements and penalties increasingly applied to more offenders."

Judges have no choice but to impose mandatory minimum sentences required by statute. But in the 2005 case United States v. Booker, the Supreme Court ruled on Sixth Amendment grounds that federal sentencing guidelines, previously treated as mandatory, are merely advisory. That decision freed federal judges to impose sentences below the guideline range when they thought justice required it.

Jackson was hardly unusual in taking advantage of that discretion. In fiscal year 2019, the USSC found, 59 percent of nonproduction offenders received sentences below the guideline range, compared to less than 16 percent in FY 2005. "There had been a steady increase in the percentage of sentences imposed below the applicable guideline range in non-production child pornography cases," the USSC notes, "which indicate[s] that courts increasingly believed the sentencing scheme for such offenders was overly severe."

In other words, the downward departures that Hawley presents as aberrant, marking Jackson as especially soft on "sex criminals," are actually typical. It is not hard to see why.

The USSC notes that the current guidelines, which are "constrained by statutory mandatory minimum penalties, congressional directives, and direct guideline amendments by Congress," include "a series of enhancements that have not kept pace with technological advancements." Those enhancements "cover conduct that has become so ubiquitous that they now apply in the vast majority of cases." In FY 2019, for example, "over 95 percent of non-production child pornography offenders received enhancements for use of a computer and for the age of the victim."

Thanks largely to congressional intervention, someone who views, possesses, or shares child pornography can be sent to federal prison for two decades, while someone else who does the same thing might receive probation or a sentence of less than a year. That situation is hard to reconcile with anyone's idea of justice.

Hawley's case against Jackson is based entirely on the unquestioned assumption that the current sentencing scheme is just and that any downward deviations from it must be inappropriately lenient. He cites one defendant, for example, who "had more than 600 images and videos and posted many on a public blog." The guidelines recommended a sentence of 151 to 188 months, but "Judge Jackson settled on 60 months, the lowest possible sentence allowed by law."

While a sentence of 12 to 15 years might be appropriate (or even too lenient) for someone who sexually abuses a child, Hawley thinks it's obviously just for a defendant whose crimes consisted of nothing more than collecting and sharing images of such abuse. He likewise thinks it's obvious that a five-year sentence for such conduct is akin to a slap on the wrist. Many people, including many federal judges, disagree.

Hawley's sense of justice does not even comport with the views of average citizens who serve on federal juries. In a 2014 case involving a defendant who was caught with 1,500 child porn images on his computer, for example, James Gwin, a federal judge in Cleveland, asked the jurors what they thought an appropriate sentence would be. On average, they recommended a prison term of 14 months—far shorter than the mandatory minimum (five years), the sentence recommended by prosecutors (20 years), and the term indicated by federal sentencing guidelines (27 years).

Taking a cue from the jury, Gwin sentenced the defendant to five years, the minimum required by statute, which was one-quarter the term that prosecutors wanted but still four times longer than the jurors deemed fair. No doubt Hawley would consider five years insufficient in that case as well. But he does not bother to defend that position, except by lazily and ignorantly classifying all such defendants as "sex criminals" who are "preying on children."

As a federal judge in Iowa, Mark W. Bennett likewise found that jurors did not agree with the sentences that Hawley believes are self-evidently appropriate. "Every time I ever went back in the jury room and asked the jurors to write down what they thought would be an appropriate sentence," Bennett told The Marshall Project's Eli Hager in 2015, "every time—even here, in one of the most conservative parts of Iowa, where we haven't had a 'not guilty' verdict in seven or eight years—they would recommend a sentence way below the guidelines sentence. That goes to show that the notion that the sentencing guidelines are in line with societal mores about what constitutes reasonable punishment—that's baloney."

Maybe all those jurors are out of their minds. Maybe they, unlike Hawley, are unfazed by child molestation and inclined to treat "sex criminals" leniently. Or maybe they recognize important distinctions that Hawley either does not understand or is determined to obscure.

"Protecting the most vulnerable shouldn't be up for debate," Hawley says. "Sending child predators to jail shouldn't be controversial." But the issue is not whether "child predators" should go to jail. It is whether defendants who are not "child predators" should be imprisoned for, say, 14 months (as the jurors in the Ohio case recommended), five years (the mandatory minimum in that case), or, as Hawley presumably would prefer, the 27 years recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.

Hawley takes the same knee-jerk approach to other public policies dealing with sex offenders. He thinks it is scandalous that Jackson has questioned the justification for publicly accessible sex offender registries and indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders after they have completed their prison terms. Yet there are very good reasons to question both of those policies.

Hawley is also offended that Jackson "suggested public policy is driven by a 'climate of fear, hatred & revenge' against sex offenders." But she is right about that, as Hawley's emotion-based positions illustrate.

Hawley's complete lack of seriousness on this subject is compounded by the partisan vacuity of his attack on Jackson. He suggests that her decisions in cases involving sex offenders reveal a soft spot for "child predators." He surely would not apply the same standard to Republican nominees such as Justice Neil Gorsuch, who as a 10th Circuit judge wrote a decision that upheld the Fourth Amendment rights of a child porn defendant, or Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who as a 7th Circuit judge sided with a man who was convicted of failing to register as a sex offender even though that requirement had expired.

Reasonable people may disagree about such matters. But Hawley is plainly not a reasonable person.

 

 

[Bobref]

31 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Another viewpoint:

https://reason.com/2022/03/18/josh-hawley-absurdly-suggests-that-ketanji-brown-jackson-has-a-soft-spot-for-child-predators/

The only people who would give this preposterous claim any credence at all are those who, because of their personal political predilections, don’t understand federal criminal sentencing, don’t understand the function of an appellate judge, and don’t care enough to actually learn about those subjects before they pass along that tripe. Unfortunately, we have a few of those on the GID, who insist on not just revealing, but trumpeting (no pun intended 😉), their abysmal ignorance.

Edited March 22, 2022 by Bobref

[Muda69]

11 minutes ago, Bobref said:

The only people who would give this preposterous claim any credence at all are those who, because of their personal political predilections, don’t understand federal criminal sentencing, don’t understand the function of an appellate judge, and don’t care enough to actually learn about those subjects before they pass along that tripe. Unfortunately, we have a few of those on the GID, who insist on not just revealing, but trumpeting (no pun intended 😉), their abysmal ignorance.

By "only people" you mean Mr. Hawley?

 

[Bobref]

4 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

By "only people" you mean Mr. Hawley?

 

I doubt that even he believes it. He’s just the appointed hatchet man.

[swordfish]

Just now, Bobref said:

I doubt that even he believes it. He’s just the appointed hatchet man.

And there's the point.  Why give the man's (Hawley) speech any further recognition?  Just ignore it, kinda like ignoring the Yale law "free speech" debate debacle in the same manner.

Look, she's gonna be the next Supreme Court Justice, we all know that.  She's more than qualified.  Just acknowledge the fact that she was chosen to be the token "First black female SCOTUS nominee" for a geriatric racist old white President.  

[Bobref]

2 minutes ago, swordfish said:

And there's the point.  Why give the man's (Hawley) speech any further recognition?  Just ignore it, kinda like ignoring the Yale law "free speech" debate debacle in the same manner.

Look, she's gonna be the next Supreme Court Justice, we all know that.  She's more than qualified.  Just acknowledge the fact that she was chosen to be the token "First black female SCOTUS nominee" for a geriatric racist old white President.  

She’s more than qualified. The rest is irrelevant to me. Just partisan political noise.

[swordfish]

6 minutes ago, Bobref said:

She’s more than qualified. The rest is irrelevant to me. Just partisan political noise.

Then why the passionate defense?  Why not ignore him?  

 

37 minutes ago, Bobref said:

The only people who would give this preposterous claim any credence at all are those who, because of their personal political predilections, don’t understand federal criminal sentencing, don’t understand the function of an appellate judge, and don’t care enough to actually learn about those subjects before they pass along that tripe. Unfortunately, we have a few of those on the GID, who insist on not just revealing, but trumpeting (no pun intended 😉), their abysmal ignorance.

Sorry Bobref - I waded into this topic this morning, I really gotta get back to work instead of this stuff.

[Bobref]

5 minutes ago, swordfish said:

Sorry Bobref - I waded into this topic this morning, I really gotta get back to work instead of this stuff.

Me too.

[DE]

3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Another viewpoint:

https://reason.com/2022/03/18/josh-hawley-absurdly-suggests-that-ketanji-brown-jackson-has-a-soft-spot-for-child-predators/

 

 

Correct.  That is another viewpoint.

 

[DE]

You can't with some of these people.  😂

[swordfish]

Popped in on the SCOTUS hearings during lunch.  Reading some of the stories I noticed that Ms. Brown "pushes back" while I recall Kavanaugh's "angrily denying". 

[DE]

1 hour ago, swordfish said:

Popped in on the SCOTUS hearings during lunch.  Reading some of the stories I noticed that Ms. Brown "pushes back" while I recall Kavanaugh's "angrily denying". 

The media is her friend.  The media is ALL the liberals friend.  Those who deny either have their head in the sand or their head up their a$$.  Which is really the same thing.