The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Republicans’ criticism of Ketanji Brown Jackson is part of the reason Black women like me left the party

About US is a forum to explore issues of race and identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.

One of the reasons I am no longer a card-carrying Republican is because the party simply does not actively court, value or embrace smart Black women among their ranks. Yes, we can point to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; Kay Coles James, director of the office of personnel management under former president George W. Bush and current Virginia secretary of the commonwealth; Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears; and former Utah congresswoman Mia Love as Black female success stories in the Republican Party. And retired federal Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by Bush, and who was considered a serious contender for the Supreme Court.

The problem is that after those five names, I am hard pressed to come up with any others. Trust me, I know. I spent over 20 years of my life as a Republican woman of color, and it was not a very positive experience. I have written many articles about it over the years, and I am sad to see little has changed since I first joined the GOP as a college sophomore in 1988.

The reality is that as we head into the confirmation phase of the historic Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Republican Party that will vet her in the Senate does not have one elected Black woman in the Congress. White women are represented in local, state and federal offices, but not as well as Democratic women, who make up the majority of the country’s female elected officials.

In the current Congress, women make up 38 percent of Democrats, a much bigger share than the 14 percent of women who are Republican members. Across both chambers, there are 106 Democratic women and 38 Republican women in the new Congress. Women account for 40 percent of House Democrats and 32 percent of Senate Democrats, compared with 14 percent of House Republicans and 16 percent of Senate Republicans.

Biden’s nomination of Jackson to the Supreme Court on Friday, along with his historic choice of Kamala D. Harris as his running mate in 2020, has likely solidified the Black female vote for Democrats for the next century. Maybe that’s why Republican senators, the Republican National Committee and many conservative White male pundits are carping about the unfairness of Biden’s commitment to appoint the first Black woman to the court.

But here’s something Republicans should consider: Every historic first nominated to the Supreme Court has received overwhelming bipartisan support, even when the nominee did not share the judicial philosophy or political party of the senators who voted for them. Starting in 1967 when Thurgood Marshall, who was confirmed 69 to 11 as the first Black associate justice of the court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was confirmed 99 to 0 when she became the first female member of the court in 1981. The Senate confirmed the first Latina, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in 2009 by a vote of 68 to 31.

For Black women, Jackson’s nomination is ‘magic on such a profound level’

These shrieks and rants of “affirmative action” about Jackson’s nomination are just raw meat for an aggrieved White base of Americans who see any racial progress as a threat to their own. Not only are Jackson’s credentials impeccable, they are in line with most other nominees: Most are Ivy League-educated, many are former law clerks and have experience on the federal bench; Jackson checks all of those boxes.

If Senate Republicans try to derail Jackson’s nomination they risk going down in history as breaking from precedent in overwhelmingly supporting historic nominees to the court. They also invite questions of whether their actions are racially motivated.

Critics didn’t wait to find out which Black woman Biden would name; they attacked the idea that any Black woman was qualified for the job. Take Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, who suggested that Biden’s nominee would not know the difference between a J.CREW catalogue and a law book, or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who when asked about diversity on his staff, responded, “I don’t know if any black women work for my office.” Let’s not forget Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) who argued that Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman was offensive to a majority of Americans and perhaps, worst of all was Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, who said of the potential black female nominee: “The irony is that the Supreme Court is at the very same time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota.” Wicker’s comments came during an interview with local radio network SuperTalk Mississippi, referring to the high court’s recent decision to reconsider challenges to race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told the New York Times: “The idea that race and gender should be the No. 1 and No. 2 criteria is not as it should be.” Collins went further in this interview and said, “On the other hand, there are many qualified Black women for this post and given that Democrats, regrettably, have had some success in trying to paint Republicans as anti-Black, it may make it more difficult to reject a Black jurist.” I find her comments unfortunate, not only because she is a woman, but because just last year she voted to support Jackson’s nomination to the D.C. Circuit.

Republicans weigh how big a part of midterm message to make Biden’s Supreme Court pick

Let’s put this into context: Donald Trump was the first Republican president since Nixon not to put a Black jurist on the U.S. Court of Appeals. Trump and his Republican Senate allies placed over 200 judges on the bench in four years, including three on the Supreme Court. These judges were overwhelmingly White, male and conservative. Nine of them were rated as “unqualified” by the American Bar Association. But that did not matter to Trump and McConnell, who was Senate majority leader at that time. They forged ahead, with then-Judiciary Chairman Lindsay Graham (S.C.) leading the way.

In September 2020, I penned a piece here in The Washington Post titled, “Republicans grab a Supreme Court seat, denying Black women their turn.” It was in response to Republicans, who at the time controlled the Senate, announcing they would vote to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died less than two months before the 2020 presidential election. Trump even promised to appoint a woman and nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett (not only did Republicans not complain about quotas, they highlighted her gender and touted the fact that she had seven children.) Four years earlier, McConnell had refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, citing the Senate’s practice of not allowing a floor vote of federal judicial nominees during an election year. Had Senate Republicans honored that rule in 2020, Biden would have gotten the chance to fill the vacancy.

Biden is getting his chance now, and he is using it to make a historic choice. It’s no different from President Ronald Reagan’s pledge that the time had come for a female jurist to take her place in history. I remember being a freshman in high school in 1981, when Reagan named O’Connor to the Court. It was exciting. Now, here I am in my 50s, and I am ecstatic that Jackson is someone who looks like me, has similar life experiences to mine and, most of all, brings a different lens by which to process the complex issues that she will be presented with on the court.

correction

A previous version of this article misstated the name of Virginia’s lieutenant governor. She is Winsome Earle-Sears. This article has been corrected.

Loading...