WASHINGTON (CN) — The Senate voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court Thursday, securing her place in history as the first Black woman justice to serve on the highest court in the nation.
All 50 Senate Democrats as well as three Republican senators backed Jackson’s confirmation as the 116th Supreme Court justice, marking a rare moment of bipartisanship after GOP lawmakers spent Jackson’s confirmation hearings accusing the soon-to-be justice of being a liberal judicial activist with a soft spot for criminals.
Republican Senators Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted to confirm Jackson, all citing her résumé qualifications as reason for their support despite widespread opposition from their caucus to her confirmation.
Jackson, at 51, is poised to be the second-youngest justice on the court. She spent her early law career working as an attorney in private practice, a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and later a federal public defender.
Experience as a public defender rarely leads to a lawyer’s ascension to the federal bench, much less the Supreme Court, which has never had a justice with that background. Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991, was the last justice on the court with experience representing indigent defendants.
Jackson also spent eight years as a federal district judge before she secured a highly coveted post on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
“Judge Jackson will go down in history as an American giant upon whose shoulders others will stand tall and our democracy will be better off for,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said on the Senate floor Thursday.
While her ascension will not tip the ideological balance of the 6-3 conservative court, it nevertheless marks a historic moment for an institution that has been dominated by white men for much of its history. The confirmation of Jackson also fulfills a longstanding campaign promise by President Joe Biden to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
When Jackson takes her seat on the bench later this summer, four of the nine justices will be women, the most women to ever serve on the court at one time in its more than 230-year history. She will be the third Black justice on the Supreme Court.
Standing in the Senate chamber Thursday, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, spoke of the Supreme Court’s own history, its creation at a time when women did not have the right to vote and when millions of Black people were enslaved and denied human rights.
“Our struggle to enfranchise and empower women did not end with the 19th amendment 102 years ago, it continues to this day as well, as we strive to give our daughters the same opportunities we give our sons. This confirmation of the first Black woman to the Supreme Court honors the history that has come before it. It honors the struggles of the past, of the men and women who waged them. This confirmation draws America one step closer, one step, to healing our nation. One step closer to a more perfect union,” Durbin said.
“We’re beginning to write another chapter in our nation’s quest for equal justice under the law, and that chapter begins with three letters: K.B.J.,” Durbin added.
Jackson’s ties to the Supreme Court go all the way back to the start of her career when, after graduating Harvard Law School, she clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, the very jurist Jackson is set to replace after he retires at the end of this term.
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