Republicans may rightly find flaws in the somewhat slippery jurisprudence of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (though her Tuesday rejection of the Constitution as a “living document” may comfort conservatives closer to the center of the aisle), but on the most contentious of the liberal politics holding the rest of the Left hostage, President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee proved positively… normal.
Jackson is personally a political liberal, no doubt about it, and not that it really matters. But when baited by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to pigeonhole herself as an adherent to the most wacky causes celebres, Jackson ran for the hills.
A double Harvard graduate and a D.C. dweller for decades, Jackson is hardly a political neophyte, and every answer she had to offer on the second day of her confirmation hearing was clearly intended to render an affirmative vote for her nomination as politically painless as possible for the key senators at the ideological center of an evenly deadlocked Senate. But that in order to secure the votes of mild-mannered centrists such as Democrat Joe Manchin or Republican Lisa Murkowski Jackson had to run for the hill away from the liberal projects du jour spells political doom for the radical identitarians dragging the Democratic Party to an unmitigated electoral disaster come November.
When Sen. Ted Cruz tried to trap Jackson into endorsing the racial essentialism touted in the curriculum of Georgetown Day School, where the judge is a board member, she refused to endorse the tenets espoused by Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby.
“Senator, I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or that they are not valued or though they are less than or that they are victims or oppressors,” Jackson responded to the Texas Republican. “I don’t believe in any of that.”
In a smart turn of strategy, Jackson spun Cruz’s invocation of her involvement with Georgetown Day School as a sign of her commitment to racial integration and progress in overcoming racism, a theme she also followed up on as she celebrated her experience versus that of her parents’ at segregated schools as evidence of “how far we have come” and “the greatness of America.”
She spoke fondly of her family in law enforcement and her role as a mother, and even though she weirdly refused to define the word “woman” when asked, she responded that she wasn’t a biologist, contradicting the central tenet to today’s liberal orthodoxy, namely that the gender binary or a specific sex at all has nothing to do with biological reality.
Regardless of her ideological leanings, there’s no denying that Jackson is a smart woman, and the most ardent activists of the Left would be wise to realize that this liberal, the one with the chops to spend likely near half a century on the highest court in the land, knows that critical race theory, the denial of basic human evolution, and whatever ridiculous obsession the H.R. departments of the Ivy League are set to export to the rest of us next are all politically toxic.
