By Kenneth Tiven
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s appointment as the first Black woman on the US Supreme Court was confirmed Thursday afternoon in the US Senate by a 53-47 vote. Guests in the Senate chamber applauded loudly when the vote was done.
Last week, three Republicans in a break from the party line agreed to vote for her. This foreordained Democrats would have the majority they needed in a chamber split 50-50.
Several Republicans Senators, who had exhibited extreme and rude frustration during her nomination hearing, didn’t make a fuss this time, perhaps because the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell realized the negative reaction it created, so he made one last argument against Judge Jackson’s nomination, framing the nomination as an example of the Far Left taking control of the Democratic Party.
Understand the context of the past six weeks: context is defined as the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs. Opposition to Judge Jackson is weaponizing in advance of a national election with voting starting in about 24 weeks. Republicans are desperate for a win to cripple a Democratic president as a precursor to trying to elect Donald Trump again in 2024.
McConnell certainly meant this when he stretched his rhetoric to say, “The Biden administration let the radicals run the show. The Far Left got the reckless inflationary spending they wanted. The Far Left has gotten the insecure border they wanted. And today, the Far Left will get the Supreme Court justice they wanted.”
Performance (for voters, not historians) is the key to understanding why Republican senators spun their arguments on race, ideology, and identity, not the qualifications of a well-regarded federal appeals judge who is the 51-year-old daughter of school teachers. She becomes only the eighth person who is not a white male to sit on the court and the first African-American woman.
It is not lost on many people that this line of attack was unnecessary for judicial reasons. She will not change the conservative 6-3 super majority when she replaces retiring Justice Stephen Breyer at the end of this court session in July.
What will home state voters do to the three Republicans who agreed that Judge Jackson was a good choice?
Of the trio, only Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is up for re-election this year. She won her term six years ago by running as a write-in candidate against the party’s choice, an experience which shifted her away from the rightward drift of the GOP. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was re-elected in 2020, and Senator Mitt Romney’s term will be up in 2024. Collins in unlikely to seek reelection at age 74, while Romney is wealthy and has other things to do if the Utah Republicans turf him out.
Perhaps as an Indian reader with an interest in American legal issues and politics, you are confused by what happens almost continually now between national elections in a country with only two major political parties. It is about projecting power. America’s political environment has devolved to an extent where nothing is sacred. All discourse, conflict and voting is merely part of the spectacle of a democracy which has become increasingly unrepresentative.
Much of the performative behavior in the Senate comes from three senators who believe their behavior will help them inherit Donald Trump’s voters, assuming he cannot run again in 2024. Evidence in the investigations of the January 6 insurrection clearly implicates Trump’s closest advisers for organizing it. Trump insists he wants to run again, today mailing this reporter (and thousands of others) offering to match any donation at a ratio of $10 to each $1 donated. Is this desperation? Or just a Trump con to increase donations to a fund he can spend as he wants? An unofficial candidate does not need to adhere to campaign finance rules. We report, You decide.
Finally, Donald Trump has said, “I didn’t win the election,” in an interview with historians preparing an assessment of his presidency. But a few minutes later he contradicted himself, saying “the election was rigged and lost.”
Trump recently said he’d like to ask Russian President Putin for information that would support Trump’s contention that somehow President Biden son Hunter Biden did illegal deals in Ukraine. Obviously right wing media support for Russia’s war against Ukraine has not gone unnoticed at Mar a Lago, the Trump club and retreat in Florida.
The reality is that the Republicans at the state level are primarily a minority party but using legislative power to pass laws to make voting difficult for people most likely to be Democrats. In Arizona, for example, the legislature is working to pass a law that would purge significant numbers of voters from the polls, forcing them to reapply if they are even aware they have been purged. They desperately want to unseat Democrat Mark Kelly from the US Senate seat as a step toward gaining power there.
Unlike India where the Election Commission runs all national and statewide elections with a consistent set of rules and regulations, America leaves national and statewide elections to each state, creating 50 different sets of rules and regulations. Voter suppression is all about getting more states to make it harder to vote while preventing Congress from passing laws to set uniform standards. Context again: it’s a bug or a feature of the US system depending on how you view an issue.
Midterm national elections are just seven months away. I learned this week in Interviews with Fox News viewers that the US economy is close to collapse; that only because President Joe Biden is weak and physically incapacitated have NATO troops not rushed into the Ukraine to save it; perhaps also because Biden didn’t handle withdrawal from Afghanistan properly. All of this is based on Fox’s role as the supplier of information that only agrees with people who believe in Trump. None of the examples cited here are even close to the reality of what has happened. Nuance and context are not part of the Fox editorial process leaving millions of Americans inoculated against reason but not vaccinated againstCovid-19.
A good example of this is Tim Ryan , a moderate Democrat running for a US Senate Seat in Ohio after serving 10 terms in the House of Representatives. He generally won his district with 60% or more of the vote but barely won in 2020 with 53% as both attitudes and demographics shifted rightward. Ryan is attempting to bring disaffected Democratic votes back to win the Senate race. A long detailed story about this race brought significant commentary.
A voter in Hamilton, Ohio said, “Sorry, Mr Ryan does not engender enough hate nor fear to fulfill the needs of today’s voters. Mr Ryan is a bland politician who is interested in good government. Good government is the last thing the voters of Ohio are interested in. We are interested in abortion, guns, bribery, the border wall. CRT, Hunter Biden, the stolen 2020 election, and of course Donald Trump, just to name a few things that get our political juices flowing”
A contrasting opinion from an Ohioan who wrote, “Ohio is depressing on the outskirts of the cities. Drugs, unemployment, cost of living, crime… it’s all up. Some of the smaller towns I’ve been through are barely a shadow of what they once were 15 years ago. I understand how Trump got a hold of people’s anger and frustration, cause really that’s all he’s about, not solutions or unity…he was never going to fix anyone’s lives here in the buckeye state but people are just so down here now and I get it. It’s just as frustrating to see people clinging to this guy like a golden idol who’s going to help them. I don’t know how to ween them off Trump but the sooner the better.”
Another voter explained it this way: “Democrats’ struggles go far beyond Trump. The outrage, racial resentment and white grievances harnessed by Republicans have proven too salient for some voters who see their identity and way of life under attack…it is all about identity. Somehow the Democrats are the ones accused of identity politics (despite the fact that their coalition is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, dare I say multi-identity), but it is Republicans that explicitly campaign on identity, stoke identity, and appeal to one and only one identity. Tim Ryan has shown repeatedly that he understands. In a sane and rational voting populace, in a sane and rational country, Rep. Ryan would be ahead by a country mile. Alas, this is not a sane and rational country.”
He gets the last word.