The issues GOP senators may focus on during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings

Washington – President Biden announces Friday Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson like yours historic candidate for the Supreme Court he launched a confirmation battle in the Senate, where Republican senators have pledged to look closely at Jackson’s record before determining whether they support his nomination.

While Jackson does not need Republican support to be confirmed in the country’s highest court if all Democrats support him (Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate and Vice President Kamala Harris breaks the tie), the president Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin has said he wants confirmation. vote to be bipartisan.

Some Republican senators, such as Mitt Romney of Utah, have said they are open to voting to confirm Jackson, but minority leader Mitch McConnell has been critical of her. Examining her nearly nine years in the federal bench, the Republican Senate leader said in a statement that Jackson has posted two opinions in her nine months on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. , and one of its district court decisions. was reversed by a unanimous panel of three judges at the DC Circuit.

McConnell also claimed that Jackson was the “preferred choice of far-left dark money groups” who have advocated adding seats to the Supreme Court and questioned its legitimacy.

Jackson individual meetings began with the senators on Wednesday, and their confirmation hearings, which will last four days, start March 21st. During the two days of questioning members of the Judiciary Committee, here are some topics you can expect Republicans to focus on.

Investments

During his eight years in the district court, Jackson was the author of 578 decisions and, as McConnell said, issued two opinions in the nine months he has been on the DC circuit, according to his questionnaire sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee. . He presided over 12 trials as a district court judge and was denied 12 cases.

Ten of his U.S. district court rulings were overturned by the DC Circuit, either in whole or in part, he wrote in his questionnaire. Jackson told the Judicial Committee last year that 2% of the written opinions he issued were reversed by the DC Circuit.

One such decision involves a 2018 challenge filed by federal employee unions to three executive orders issued by then-President Donald Trump over their collective bargaining rights. Jackson ruled for the unions, finding that the court had the power to hear their claims and that most of the provisions of the executive orders conflicted with the collective bargaining rights of federal workers under federal labor law.

A DC Circuit panel unanimously overturned Jackson’s decision, ruling that unions must pursue their claims through administrative processes, followed by appeals courts.

In another legal battle overheard by Jackson while working in the district court, immigrant rights groups sued the Department of Homeland Security over a rule that extended expedited deportation. Jackson granted a request from organizations to block the Trump administration from enforcing the rule. But a three-judge DC circuit court overturned Jackson’s grant of the preliminary order.

The case of Don McGahn

During his tenure in the federal judiciary, Jackson did not appear to have made decisions on political issues such as abortion, the Second Amendment, or religious freedom, and the DC Circuit listens to many cases related to administrative law.

However, the Jackson District Court record includes the High profile dispute of 2019 between the Judicial Committee of the House and former White House attorney Don McGahn, in which he said McGahn had to comply with a congressional summons to testify.

“Presidents are not kings. That means they have no subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose fate they have the right to control,” he wrote. “Rather, in this land of freedom, it is indisputable that White House employees work for the people of the United States and take an oath to protect and defend the United States Constitution.”

Several Republicans asked Jackson, in person and in writing, about his decision in this case during his process of confirming his seat on the DC circuit last year.

Grassley, in particular, made a number of inquiries to Jackson referring to his view, including whether former President Barack Obama was a “king” and whether the Justice Department claimed “monarchical powers for the president” in the case of McGahn.

Meanwhile, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina asked Jackson about his characterization of his opinion on the McGahn case as “just one more opinion” and asked him to explain why, at 118 pages, fit this description.

William Burck, who represented McGahn during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, backed Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, CNN reported Tuesday.

Previous customers

Democrats praising Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination have highlighted her professional experience, which includes periods in private practice, with the U.S. Sentencing Commission and as an assistant federal public defender. If confirmed by the Senate, she will be the only acting judge to serve as a public defender and the first since Judge Thurgood Marshall to represent criminal defendants.

While Jackson’s supporters consider this experience a welcome one, Republican Judicial Committee is likely to focus on the clients she represented while working for two years in the Federal Office of the Attorney General in Washington.

In written questions sent to Jackson last year, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska asked why, as an assistant federal ombudsman, she worked on behalf of Khi Ali Gul, who was captured by Afghan forces in 2002. designated an enemy combatant and sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He was released and transferred to Afghan authorities in 2014. Sasse also asked if Jackson was considering resigning if he did not have an option to work on behalf of the detainee.

Jackson told Sasse that she and other attending federal prosecutors were representing Guantanamo detainees whose legal claims were being litigated in Washington’s federal courts.

“The Federal Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, is a relatively small office, and as far as I know, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia was the only place where the lawsuits of the Guantánamo detainees, “he said. he wrote. “Khi Ali Gul was one of the people representing the DC Federal Ombudsman’s office, and in my role as Deputy Federal Ombudsman, I drafted several motions and worked on other court files on his behalf.” .

Jackson added that during this time, his brother was in the U.S. Army and deployed in Iraq, and wrote that he was “deeply and personally aware of the tragic and deplorable circumstances that led to the “Attention and detention by the US government of people who were insured in Guantánamo Bay”.

He noted that, according to the rules of ethics, “a lawyer has a duty to represent his clients with zeal, which includes refraining from contradicting his client’s legal arguments and / or undermining his client’s interests by publicly declaring personal disagreement of the lawyer with the legal position or the alleged conduct. “

Sasse also questioned Jackson about his work on court writings in support of Guantanamo Bay detainees whose cases were before the Supreme Court and whether that work “would result in more terrorists.” released back in the fight against the United States? “

Jackson responded that she was working for the Supreme Court and the Appeals Group of a private law firm at the time those cases were before the Supreme Court and co-authored amicus briefs for clients in two of the cases, one on behalf of former federal judges and the other on behalf of the Cato Institute, the Constitution Project, and the Rutherford Institute.

“I think I was assigned to work on these amicus writings because of the knowledge of the military court processes I had accumulated from my previous job as an assistant federal public defender,” she told Sasse.

Grassley also focused on a court friend’s letter that Jackson assisted the perpetrator on behalf of pro-abortion groups in a 2001 case before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals involving a law of Massachusetts which created a six-foot floating damping zone around abortion. clinics.

“I was assigned to work on this amicus writing related to an issue that was pending in the First Circuit, among other projects,” he wrote in response to a question from Grassley about his involvement, saying the brief was filed when she was an associate in a Boston law firm and in her final year practicing law.

Other notable cases

As a district judge for the United States, Jackson condemned the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Edgar Maddison Welch, four years in prison. Welch acknowledged that he entered the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington with an AR-15 and a revolver in December 2016 to investigate a conspiracy theory. He pleaded guilty to violations of federal law and the DC code.

As a federal appellate court judge, Jackson served on the panel of three judges he rejected Trump’s attempt to prevent the National Archives and Records Administration from handing over its White House records to the select committee of the House investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump called for Supreme Court intervention in this way, through the judges refused to block the Archives to deliver the documents to the commission on January 6.

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