Clarence Page: First Black woman Supreme Court nominee faces same old ‘ridiculousness’

You can tell a lot about the strength of President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee by the weakness and shallowness of the political backlash against her.

When Biden announced on the campaign trail that he intended to nominate the first Black woman justice, everyone knew that conservatives would still control the Supreme Court, regardless of whom Biden picked.

Of the nine justices on the high court, six were appointed by a Republican president and three, including the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, were appointed by Democrats.

And when Biden on Friday named Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to replace Breyer, for whom she used to be a clerk, there was little question that the double graduate of Harvard and former editor of the Harvard Law Review was, at the very least, qualified.

Yet, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell took out his shovel that day and proceeded to dig up what sounded like dirt.

“I understand Judge Jackson was the favored choice of far-left, dark-money groups that have spent years attacking the legitimacy and structure of the Court itself,” he said in a statement.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued in his own statement, “Even before this nominee was named, the right-wing donors who packed the Court under President Trump sought to disparage Justice Breyer’s replacement, alleging the same dark-money scheme that they, themselves, hatched and executed.”

But even before Jackson’s nomination was announced, a storm was brewing, aimed particularly at Biden’s bold promise on the campaign trail to name the high court’s first Black woman justice.

Biden’s political sin was to violate a traditional bit of Washington etiquette in matters of race and gender: Pretend as though you haven’t made up your mind, even though you already have.

President Ronald Reagan, an iconic figure in Republican lore, similarly promised to name the first woman, who turned out to be Sandra Day O’Connor. It was about time then, too.

Yet, Biden’s similar promise to name a Black woman was called “offensive” and “an insult to Black women,” said Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a podcast.

Why? “Black women are what, 6% of the U.S. population?” said Cruz. “He’s saying to 94% of Americans ‘I don’t give a damn about you, you are ineligible.’ ”

Gee, I had no idea that the number of eligible Americans for the Supreme Court was so high. Cruz appears to subscribe to the zero-sum game that paints even a modest advance for racial or gender diversity as a loss for white people, particularly white men. Americans, at our best, are supposed to be more optimistic than that.

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.”

But she also acknowledged that “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.”

Not much more difficult, judging by the right-wing rhetoric that already has been raised.

Can’t we all get along? Supreme Court confirmations have been battles waged by both parties at least since President Reagan’s 1987 nomination of the formidable conservative Robert Bork. His confirmation fight was so ferocious it led to a new word in dictionaries, “borking,” for obstruction by systematic defaming or vilification.

But I think Judge Jackson will do well in her hearings if she keeps the “thick skin” she described to a Black student group at the University of Chicago in 2020.

“As a professional of color,” she said, “there will inevitably be times when you will feel singled out, challenged, questioned, undervalued and misinterpreted, and you will very much want to call out or cancel people who say and do discriminatory things.”

“But doing so takes time and effort,” she continued, “and if we are going to get to where we belong … we can’t keep stopping and fretting over random ridiculousness!”

Right on. Even when the ridiculousness comes from our nation’s highest officeholders.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)