A little girl asked Obama to nominate her mom to the Supreme Court. Her wish might just come true.

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

A glass ceiling in America is one step closer to shattering as President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, began her historic Senate confirmation hearings this week. 

Jackson, whose parents were school teachers and uncle became a police chief, spent eight years as a district judge in D.C. before replacing former President Barack Obama’s would-be Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, as a circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2021, when Garland became Biden’s attorney general. Jackson, who began her legal career as a law clerk for Breyer—the same justice she hopes to succeed—has issued approximately 573 written decisions during her tenure as a judge.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings began Monday, one day after Justice Clarence Thomas was hospitalized on Sunday for “flu-like symptoms.” Thomas went on to miss three consecutive days of oral hearings as he remained in hospital, with few details of his condition being released by court officials. 

Chairman Dick Durbin ended his opening statement by invoking another Illonois politician—Abraham Lincoln—calling Jackson one of Lincoln’s “living witnesses of an America that is unafraid of change.”

Senior Iowan Sen. Chuck Grassley made it roughly one minute into his opening statement before invoking the name of Brett Kavanaugh, slamming Democrats for their decorum during his 2018 Senate hearing—conveniently forgetting Kavanaugh’s demeanor and claims of being sabotaged as part of what he called “revenge by friends of the Clintons.”

South Carolina Sen. Graham, remembered for the temper tantrum he threw during Kavanaugh’s hearing, talked about how he couldn’t walk back to his office without being “spat on” during that hearing. In his opening statement, he also admitted that he was “used to” being accused of being racist. 

Graham, who said “this is a new game for the Supreme Court and I’m not going to reward the new rules,” displayed quite the microaggression when claiming the Democrats accused Kavanaugh of “being basically Bill Cosby.” 

As National Review writer Andrew C. McCarthy wrote, the Republican outcry about Jackson’s record was “meritless to the point of demagoguery.”

Responding to a nonsensical tangent about whether babies are racist from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who went to law school with Jackson, she said: “I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or as though they are not valued or though they are less than, that they are victims, that they are oppressors.”

A common theme among the GOP has been concern about Jackson’s ‘judicial philosophy.’ What Republicans are deliberately overlooking when they argue the Constitution should be interpreted as it was originally written is the fact that the Constitution as originally written would have prevented Jackson from ever becoming a lawyer altogether.

Jackson would be the first federal public defender to become a Supreme Court Justice

Retiring Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy noted that if confirmed, Jackson would be the first Supreme Court Justice in history to have served as a federal public defender, something he calls “an important experience given how much the court shapes our criminal justice system.”

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal used his opening statement to call Jackson a “proven unifier and a consensus builder.”

“One of the first lessons that you learned as a prosecutor is never to promise a jury evidence that you don’t have,” Blumenthal said. “Importantly, your record as a jurist also reveals impartiality.”

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is making her tenth set of Supreme Court Justice hearings, pointed to some of the cases on the current term docket alone: a woman’s fundamental right to control her own body and make her own healthcare decisions, the legal authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to fight climate change, and whether states have the power to enact common sense gun safety protections.

Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono noted that Jackson moved from D.C. to Miami at a young age so her father could go to law school. It was during her father’s studies at the kitchen table that Jackson found herself thinking for the first time about trading her coloring book for a textbook.

“You have sided with workers and employers, for and against the government, for prosecutors and for criminal defendants,” Hirono noted.

In his opening statement, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker noted that two-thirds of confirmed judges under President Biden “have come from groups who historically have not been represented in our federal courts.” 

“This nomination brings an artificially-confining mould of our past and opens up a more promising potential future for us all as Americans,” Booker said.

Booker pointed to Jackson’s work as a public defender as significant, as “80 per cent of those who go before [U.S.] criminal courts can’t afford an attorney.”

In what has perhaps been the most inspiring part of Jackson’s confirmation hearing was a story Booker told about a letter her daughter wrote to President Obama when she was 11-years-old. In that letter, Leila asked Obama to nominate her mother to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying her mother would be “a great Supreme Court Justice.”

“I suspect after these proceedings … and your confirmation to the Supreme Court, something new will happen in America that that letter from your daughter will not be exceptional,” Booker said. “Generations of little young girls and generations of little young boys, no matter who their parents are, will have the audacity to write to the President of the United States … that my mom should be on the Supreme Court.”

More coverage of Jackson’s confirmation hearing will follow next week.