If Democrats hadn’t turned the confirmation of judicial appointments into a blood sport in which everything but physical assassination is fair game, Judge Janice Rogers Brown may well have been the first black woman nominated to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, Joe Biden threatened that if President Bush were to nominate here, the nomination would be filibustered and killed. Marc Thiessen excavated this ancient history in his February 1 Washington Post column (posted here in accessible form by AEI).
If nominated to the Court, however, Judge Brown would have been able to define the meaning of “woman” for her senatorial interlocutors. This places her in marked contrast with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose nomination to the Court was confirmed by the Senate yesterday. Biden himself devalued her qualifications for the Court when he made her race and sex prerequisites to her nomination.
Alana Goodman has written a fitting postscript to the confirmation of Justice Jackson in the Free Beacon story “Dems Celebrate Confirmation of First Black Woman to Supreme Court. But Liberal Women’s Groups Won’t Say What A Woman Is.” Goodman writes:
Supporters of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are celebrating her historic confirmation as the first black woman on the Supreme Court. But like the new justice, they are tight-lipped about what it means to be a woman.
The Washington Free Beacon surveyed seven major pro-Democratic women’s groups to see if they could provide a definition of the term “woman”—a word that Jackson said she was unable to define during her confirmation hearings because she is “not a biologist.”
The suspense is not exactly killing. Silence, as you may have guessed, is golden in this case for now.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.