Last week, the Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. She will be the first black woman to sit on the Supreme Court. She will also be the Court’s first former public defender. She has two degrees from Harvard and once clerked for Justice Steven Breyer; however, none of this was enough to prevent a largely party-line confirmation vote.
The Senate approved Judge Brown 53-47, with only three Republicans supporting her. Over the last twenty years, the partisan trend has only worsened. In 1994, Steven Breyer was confirmed, 87-9. In 2005, John Roberts was confirmed with 78 votes, including 22 Democrats. In 2017, Neil Gorsuch received three democratic votes. A year later, Brett Kavanaugh received one; and in 2020, Amy Coney Barrett received none. In this month’s hearings, the complaints against the nominee were nonsensical: she went easy on pedophiles, she defended terrorists, she was in-league with shadowy moneyed figures from the far-left. The rule-of-thumb of showing deference to presidential prerogative is now gone—members come to the table with their minds made up and looking for any excuse to reject the nominee.
This partisanship is an example of deviance. It occurs when representatives puts their own self-interest ahead of the welfare of the society. A well-run society tries to tamp it down, but in America, deviance has become brazen and even celebrated. This erosion of American governance is not to be taken lightly. Regardless of which party is in power, democracies work best when dialog overcomes differences of opinions and leads to a better solution than would have been created without it. An absence of legitimate dialog weakens the entire system. One only need look to examples such as Chile in the late-1960s to early-1970s to see the damage a polarized government can have on a society.
Leaders are hired to lead, not parrot nonsense from conspiracy-prone constituents. When it becomes acceptable, and even cool, to be loud-mouthed, vile, and ugly, the system is breaking down. This is not helping the US—this is not helping us.
Source:
Ruth Marcus, “The Supreme Court is Broken. So is the System that Confirms its Justices,” Washington Post editorial, A29, 10 Apr 2022.
Carl Hulse, Annie Karni, “Jackson Confirmed as First Black Woman to Sit on Supreme Court,” New York Times, 7 April 2022; accessed from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/us/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court.html
Amy Davidson Sorkin, “The Kentanji Brown Jackson Hearings May Be Only the Beginning,” New Yorker, 9 Apr 2022; accessed from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/18/the-ketanji-brown-jackson-hearings-may-be-only-the-beginning
Jared Diamond, Upheaval, Chapter 4: A Chile for All Chileans, Little, Brown & Company, New York, 2019.
Photo: Senate Livestream
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