(Feb. 25) Joe Biden may occupy the Oval Office, but his Supreme Court choice reconfirms that he is running Bernie Sanders’s administration.
Just about every time Biden has had a choice between acting simply as an old-fashioned liberal and acting as a hard leftist along the lines of the openly socialist senator from Vermont, Biden has gone hard-left. His choice of appeals court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson continues that predilection. It also sides Biden again with the privileged elites of the Democratic Left rather than the less crusading, more practical liberalism of the working rank and file.
To be clear, Brown Jackson is by general agreement a fine person with impressive qualifications. Most Republican opponents will not try to trash her personally or promote ludicrous smears about alleged gang rapes or pornographic movies. Opposition to her should be thoughtful, dignified, and based on legitimate complaints about her public record.
That record, though, is worrisome, in terms both of quality and of ideology. Many critics have noted she has an unusually prominent record of having her decisions reversed on appeal, with even liberal judges joining conservatives in saying Brown Jackson got basic legal principles very wrong. Indeed, a full panel of an appeals court reversed one of her decisions just 11 days ago. In many of these cases, her decisions seemed based more on strained interpretations in service of liberal political positions — for example, against border enforcement — than on the more obvious readings of applicable law.
And as Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has noted, a nonpartisan analyst on the quality of legal writing repeatedly found Brown Jackson’s written opinions to be significantly less impressive than those of recent nominees and of one of the other judges, purportedly more centrist, on Biden’s final “short list” of Supreme Court choices…. [The full column is here.]
