Here's Why Ketanji Brown Jackson was the Right Choice for the Supreme Court

     Confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court begin on Monday, March 21st, 2022. From the moment he announced his campaign, President Biden pledged to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court if he got the chance. Within weeks, political pundits, who often get things so wrong, got it right when they speculated Ketanji Brown Jackson would likely be a top contender for the Supreme Court spot. They got it right again in June 2021 when speculation grew as she became one of the first federal judges appointed by President Biden to be confirmed by the Senate.

     Tucker Carlson asking to see her credentials is nothing short of racist. While all of the sitting members of the Supreme Court with the exception of Amy Coney Barrett are qualified to serve on the bench, Brown will be the most qualified of them all. She attended a public high school, went to an Ivy League Law School, served as a clerk to a SCOTUS justice, worked as a public defender, served on the Sentencing Commission, and served on a district court and an appeals court. Aside from being the first black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she will also bring the total of women on the court to four for the first time in U.S. history, which will be the first time that the court will be nearly balanced by gender. (At nine members, it will never be perfectly even, but having a majority female Supreme Court at least once in our history is a very pertinent goal.) She will also be the first public defender to serve on the court. President Biden worked as a public defender in Delaware in the 1960s, and that is part of the reason that he has made appointing public defenders to the bench as opposed to prosecutors and corporate attorneys such a priority. 

     The specifics of Jackson's experience are equally important. Her SCOTUS clerking experience was under none other than Justice Stephen Breyer himself, and the seat she held on the D.C. Appeals Court has previously been held by Merrick Garland, Biden's attorney general and President Obama's failed 2016 Supreme Court nominee. She was appointed to the Sentencing Commission and district court by President Obama with a great deal of input from then-Vice President Biden, and she also taught at Harvard, where President Obama had been the president of the Harvard Law Review. Her experience in the former position is especially important at a time when Congress is considering the MORE Act, SAFE Banking Act, and EQUAL Act, three bills to wind down the War on Drugs.

     In short, Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination is not only historic, it just makes sense. She is highly qualified and, because of the specifics of her career, the perfect choice to replace Justice Stephen Breyer. Her teachers told her not to shoot too high when she told them she wanted to be a judge, and now she is on track to become one of the nine most powerful judges in the country.