EDITORIAL: GOP should keep it civil during Jackson hearings

Confirmation hearings began Monday for President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. If she secures enough votes in the Senate, Judge Jackson would become the first African American woman to serve on the high court.

Judge Jackson, a Harvard Law grad, has sat on the federal bench for nearly nine years, including the past nine months on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She said Monday she would “defend the Constitution and the grand experiment of American democracy that has endured over these past 246 years.”

The hearings promise to be less contentious than previous confirmation battles because Judge Jackson would replace a Democratic appointee, retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, and wouldn’t alter the court’s ideological makeup.

Too much has been made, unfortunately, of Judge Jackson’s skin color rather than her legal qualifications — in large part because of Mr. Biden’s vow on the campaign trail to nominate a Black woman to any Supreme Court opening. Critics of the president’s commitment, however, should remember that during the 1980 presidential campaign Ronald Reagan made a similar promise when he pledged to appoint the first female justice to the court in the event of a vacancy.

In fact, for partisans on either side ideology trumps gender, ethnicity or other identifying characteristics. Democratic support for minority judicial candidates does not extend to those who exhibit conservative or libertarian views. Likewise, GOP opposition to Judge Jackson will be based on her progressive judicial philosophy rather than her race.

In recent decades, Supreme Court nominations have become a lurid spectacle in bare-knuckle politics and mudslinging. After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings on Merrick Garland, nominated to the court by President Barack Obama, Democrats responded by dragging two of President Donald Trump’s selections through a noxious cesspool of muck and mire.

Rather than repeat that unseemly circus, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee should take the high road and confine their questions to the nominee’s judicial outlook and record. As Reason magazine’s Damon Root suggests, it would be instructive to hear Judge Jackson’s philosophy on “unenumerated rights” as covered under the Ninth Amendment and to hear her thoughts on the commerce clause. It would also be relevant to question her about the extent to which the judiciary should defer to the administrative state and on what limits, if any, she believes the Constitution imposes on the legislative branch.

Barring a major revelation, Judge Jackson will be confirmed with some GOP backing. Regardless of what is or isn’t said during these hearings, we will then soon discover whether her left-leaning judicial viewpoint is in harmony with the Constitution or at war with it.