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Retired Judge LaDoris Cordell said she was overjoyed when the U.S. Senate votes were tallied on Thursday afternoon and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson officially secured her elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I’m thrilled because she has made the U.S. Supreme Court look more and more like America,” Cordell told this news organization in an interview.
Cordell, a Palo Alto resident and former city council member, knows more than most people about breaking barriers. In 1982, she became the first Black woman to serve on a Superior Court in northern California. Cordell was on the Santa Clara County Superior Court bench for the next two decades, retiring from the bench in 2001. She is keenly aware of both the positive and negative pressures that Jackson will experience as she begins her tenure on the highest court in the land.
The bad pressure, she said, will come from those who have bought into the negative stereotypes about people of color and expect her to fail. These people include many in the Republican Party who opposed her confirmation and who tried to characterize her during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings as soft on crime because of her experience as a public defender.
Cordell said that Jackson demonstrated during the lengthy hearings that she can withstand and effectively respond to these attacks, which Cordell said she found appalling.
“She demonstrated that she is strong, that she can always be respectful and always, as best she could at these hearings, state the way that she’d viewed the law,” Cordell said.
Jackson, now the first Black female Supreme Court justice, will also experience “good pressure” from communities of color and from women who expect her to succeed. This pressure always goes hand-in-hand with being the first person to reach a particular achievement. Cordell said she believes Jackson will be able to handle the good pressure well and serve as a strong and independent justice.
“I know that she will bring a realistic perspective to the U.S. Supreme Court when they’re discussing cases, that she will not be timid about expressing her views,” Cordell said.
Early in her career, Jackson had served as a clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer, whom she will replace on the court after he retires following the Supreme Court’s summer recess. Jackson also worked as an attorney in private practice and as a public defender before she was appointed by former President Barack Obama to serve as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She went on to become a federal judge in 2012, winning bipartisan support for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Last year, President Joe Biden nominated her to serve as judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, an appointment that also advanced with bipartisan backing.
Her elevation to the Supreme Court proved more tumultuous, with several Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee citing her record as a public defender as evidence of her being soft on crime. But even though the committee deadlocked along party lines, she cleared her final legislative hurdle Thursday when the full Senate voted 53-47 to advance her confirmation. Three Republican senators — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney — joined every Democrat to confirm her to the court.
Cordell compared Jackson’s elevation to the Supreme Court to other historic firsts, including the nominations of Thurgood Marshall in 1967 and Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981. Marshall, the first Black justice in the history of the Supreme Court, was appointed with 69 votes of support, while O’Connor, the first female justice, received 99 votes.
“The U.S. Supreme Court, which sets the law of the land, has been a segregated institution for more than 200 years. All that time it’s only been open to white men,” Cordell said. “We have an institution that has slowly but surely become desegregated and I think there will be more.”
‘I know that she will bring a realistic perspective to the U.S. Supreme Court when they’re discussing cases, that she will not be timid about expressing her views.’
LaDoris Cordell, retired judge, on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court
Cordell said she looks forward to the day when the Supreme Court sees its first Asian American and Native American justices. But while the court still has a long way to go, she called Jackson’s confirmation a huge step. And the fact that her vote count was much closer than it was for Marshall in no way diminishes her achievement, Cordell said.
“Clearly this was a political vote and I was pleased to see three Republicans vote for her,” she said.
The Bay Area’s legislative leaders also lauded Jackson and celebrated her elevation to the Supreme Court. Rep. Jackie Speier said in a tweet that Jackson’s confirmation is a “testament to her integrity, legal prowess and temperament, and grace in the face of 13 hours of baseless GOP attacks.”
“The respect she commands is SUPREME!” Speier wrote.
Rep. Anna Eshoo called Jackson “one of the most qualified judges to ever be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
“She served as a federal public defender; a federal appellate judge; a federal district court judge; a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission; and an attorney in private practice,” Eshoo said in a statement. “Four words are engraved above the doors of the Supreme Court: Equal Justice Under Law. I’m confident Judge Jackson will make these words walk into the lives of the American people.”
KBJ is one of the most radical, left-wing supreme Court nominees ever. She supports CRT, believes in systemic racism, and can’t define what a woman is.
Great to see!
Judge Cordell is right. The way that posturing right-wing Republican Senators treated Soon-To-Be Associate Justice Jackson during the hearings was appalling.
Senators Cotton, Cruz, and Hawley, having made it clear that they have higher offices in mind, led the overtly racist and sexist Republican charge to paint her as incompetent and soft on crime.
Since Judge Jackson is the most thoroughly qualified and experienced nominee in decades, their performative pandering failed. Fortunately, Republican Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Romney voted for confirmation whilst condemning their race-baiting and sexist colleagues’ unprofessional behavior.
I am deeply ashamed of the crass display of partisanship demonstrated in the final vote.
As Joseph N. Welch so famously said to Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9, 1954 during the Army-McCarthy Hearings, “Let us not assassinate this lad [Attorney Fred Fisher] further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Then, as now, these particular Republicans have no sense of decency at all.
“look more and more like America”: Let’s fact-check the math:
Before this, the Supreme Court had one Justice who was -and is- Black: Clarence Thomas. One out of nine Justices is 11.1%. From the 2020 Census, Blacks are 13.4% of the US population, that is, underrepresented by 17.2%. After Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation, 2 Justices out of 9 is 22.2%, that is, 65.7% over-representation. Isn’t that being less representative??
If the demographic at issue is Black females, their representation jumped from 0 to 1. If Black females are half the Black population, that demographic is 6.7%, which corresponds to a 65.7% over-representation.
On another demographic: Religious background can substantially influence how you think about issues and (hopefully) your values. Since 2010 — when John Paul Stevens resigned — all members of the Supreme Court have been Roman Catholics or of Jewish ancestry, although Neil Gorsuch is a question mark. He was raised Catholic but adopted his wife’s denomination (Protestant Episcopal). Brown Jackson’s profile says she grew up Baptist, so this is an improvement in the religious diversity of the Court, but not one you can see — it doesn’t help with “looks more like America”.
Education background is an important influence, but again, not one you would see in a photo. The Court is currently divided 4/4 between Harvard and Yale Law Schools, with Brown Jackson replacing another Harvard Law (Steven Breyer). The exception is Amy Coney Barrett from Notre Dame Law School. To many, including me, this is a dangerous lack of diversity and especially a dangerous variant on “the old boys’ network”.
One of the biggest divisions between groups in the US is between those who treat “race” as the primary/predominant feature defining people and those who reject that belief. The former is unmistakable when I listen to or read them. But when I ask direct questions, they will deny that is what they meant (before returning to their advocacy).
How did Judge Cordell feel about the “appalling” treatment received by Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett by Democrats during their nomination hearings? Would she care to comment on that?
Why was KBJ unable to define what a woman is? How will that impact her work on the Supreme Court that she is unable to define a woman?
How dare the US public expect Supreme Court justices to be experienced, balanced and qualified — unlike Kavanaugh and Barrett who were chosen strictly to push Trump’s extremist anti-democratic agenda. Shameful indeed.
Poor, poor M. Kavanaugh. Has Dr. Christine Blasey Ford come out of hiding yet after the many years of death threats from his thuggish supporters. How dare a woman accuse a someone with a history of drunkenly assaulting women. The shame of it.
Why, it’s almost like Anita Hill and Justice Thomas’s hair on the coke can. How dare she object?
Speaking of Hill, here’s her piece on the disgusting conduct during the hearings in today’s Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/07/anita-hill-ketanji-brown-jackson-senate-mistreated/
@vmshadle: Demonizing those who disagree with you without any indication that you have even heard their arguments, much less tried to understand them before commenting is disqualifying.
For others: Two of the points that came across to me:
1. In a written question — from Senator Cruz — she was asked whether she supported natural rights and she replied that she had no position on it. Natural rights are key in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. KBJ’s response indicates that she believes the Bill of Rights is optional and can be ignored whenever the government finds them inconvenient. The Canadian Charter of Rights gave their government the ability to suspend them and assumed the government would act responsibly. How naive, as demonstrated during the Freedom Convoy (truckers’ protest against COVID mandates).
For this alone, I would have rejected her.
2. During the many questions about the 2013 sentencing of Wesley Hawkins to 3 months for child pornography, KBJ testified that the law had been written before the existence of the Internet and that her sentencing was intended to rectify that omission. While the law was *originally* written in the 1980s, it had been updated 9 times with the most recent in 2009 and it included computers and computer networks. See U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 110, Section 2252A – “Certain activities relating to material constituting or containing child pornography”. When Senator Durban (D-IL) claimed that the Internet was roughly a decade old, she agreed with him. Double Yikes!!
– Was she ignorant of the law under which she sentenced Hawkins? Or was she being deceptive under oath?
– While I am not surprised that none of the Senators caught this — most are fossils unfamiliar with “new-fangled” tech. Could someone so isolated from the world in which we live serve effectively?? Rather I believe that she was again being deceptive, which is far, far worse.
@Online Name of Embarcadero Oaks/Leland
For those who don’t remember the Kavanaugh hearings:
– Blasey Ford testified falsely under oath claiming that the alleged events left her afraid of confined spaces.
** She claimed that she was afraid to fly in airplanes but it was shown that she routinely flew.
** She claimed that she was afraid to be in rooms that didn’t have two exits and she added an outside door to a room in her house. Testimony was that that door was installed to allow that room to be used as an office for her consulting practice.
– People who came forward to support her claims were quickly determined to be untruthful, even though the corporate media would do at least one special trumpeting those debunked claims (ABC??).
– Many of the people at the scene of the alleged events could not support her claims.
– Last I remember, there was no testimony that could put Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford in the same house at the same time.
– Blasey Ford’s accounts of the events underwent such extensive and substantive changes that I couldn’t give them any credibility.
Wow. How soon we forget our history. Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights attorney, was the first black man to serve on the US Supreme Court. He was a giant on the Court.
Previous appointments of Brandies, then later, O’Connor, and Sotomayor expanded representation on the Court. Some Republican, some Deomocrates. We still have a ways to go to move beyond white men.
When people say, as they are about to do here, that expanded inclusion on the Court isn’t needed to attain justice, they simply state the very need for such inclusion. They can’t grasp the experience that many Americans have of suffering injustice by being unrepresented on the Court and affected by its decisions.
One other thing –
Did any of you see yesterday’s lenghty Judy Woodruuf interview with LaDoris Cordell on the PBS Newshour? Cordell put the appointment of Jackson-Brown in historical context through the questions Woodruff asked. It is well worth listening to.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ketanji-brown-jackson-becomes-the-first-black-woman-elevated-to-the-supreme-court
Congratulations on this momentous appointment. Judge Brown is highly qualified to serve as a Supreme Court Justice.
We now have three liberal justices (all female) and representative of Jewish, Hispanic, and African American backgrounds.
The next step will be to appoint an Asian American Supreme Court Justice (preferably Chinese) who will preserve and protect the civil rights of all American citizens.
The Republican-appointed justices (with the possible exception of Chief Justice John Roberts) cannot be counted on to preserve Roe vs Wade, protect LGBTQ and state voting rights, along with the teaching of Critical Race Theory in our public schools.
And one justice cannot be relied upon to provide fair and impartial judicial review of those responsible for instigating the January 6th insurrection.
• Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights attorney, was the first black man to serve on the US Supreme Court. He was a giant on the Court.
So is Clarence Thomas from the standpoint that he can be counted on for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.
The concept of a ‘living Constitution’ enables too many liberal judicial decisions that detract from the basic visions of our founders and state’s rights must be preserved as the United States is not a centralized form of government.
The claim that the Republicans who voted against confirmation are “racist” is ridiculous. Like the Democrats who all voted against Trump’s nominees, it was simply politics – were all the Democrats racially biased against white people or who voted against Barrett “misogynist”? SCOTUS is unfortunately political because it has been used to implement policy which voters are unwilling to approve. Jackson is clearly qualified, but there were legitimate political reasons to oppose her.
“So is Clarence Thomas from the standpoint that he can be counted on for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.”
Originalist or not, Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from the January 6th hearings because of the undue influence of his wife Ginni Thomas, a QAnon advocate and MAGA supporter.
He was the the only one by way of a 8-1 SCOTUS ruling that Trump and his associates are legally responsible for their insurrectionist activities.
Clarence Thomas should resign from the SCOTUS.
Too bad the Republicans’ mothers didn’t teach them manners and that only one of them stayed in the Senate Chambers. That’s the way to teach the children they claim to be so concerned about — when they’re not screeching and screaming during their “opponents” speeches.
What does “.. looking more like America” look like? If we are moving FROM the smartest and wisest people whose job it is to ensure law follows the Constitution TO the correct skin color mix that’s a scary change. That says that the value of a person is determined by their skin color. Or, is it saying more. Is it saying we need to improve the color mix AND make sure that a black or an Asian perspective is in the room? What is a black perspective if the whole objective is NOT separate and ALL equal? Obviously NO color mix is ever going to be precise – if we include an Asian are ALL Asians the same, any one of them can hold the Asian seat. We are off in pursuit of all of the equity, inclusion,diversity, etc objective of our current activism but where is this going? Do we really want a court populated with 12% black quota, 1.9% trans quota (to ensure that this important group is represented), Latinx or Mexican – which one? A lot of people and very specialized organizations are pushing hard to drive these new identities and color mixes – sadly. We want the very smartest, wisest, and capable people of character on the bench – not simply ethnic or gender symbols. We allow overwhelmingly disproportionate black players in the NBA because it’s a game of the best players not a game about skin color. Same is true for all of our other institutions. The argument that blacks or women or Catholics are OWED compensatory representation is just fashion – and a bad direction for our country.
I have no particular opinion on this other than she was picked because of her color and gender. The aim was to have a black woman and that is why she was chosen. Maybe the next candidate should also be chosen for their gender and skin color too. Abilities are no longer relevant.
Applying diversity percentages to the nine members of the Supreme Court is dumb. 1 justice is ~11% of the court. Your numbers will never match up to the distribution of the population. Few of those who opposed KBJ did so on her qualifications, their opposition was based on their own political agenda. For example, does the constitution define “woman”? (answer: No). You can be both qualified and diverse.
Doug Moran’s math (specially statistics) seems to need improving a bit. There are now 6 men and 3 women on the Supreme Court. How does represent the human composition of the US? With the appointment of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson there will be 5 men and 4 women who will make decisions for all of us. Historically men and only men have served in the Court before the appointment of Sandra Day-O’Connor. Historically only one black man at a time served and only after 1967. We need justices whose experience reflects the experience of
many unheard Americans.
I can well understand the reservation of Justice Brown Jackson (and by the way many other Justices both Republican and Democrat) in sentencing some people for crimes defined by single instances when in reality there was only one instance producing many results and whose commission maybe not even controllable. One has to be FAIR. It bestows upon the Congress not for a judge to change the law to reflect the advent of the internet. Curiously, had the judge (KBJ) applied a different criteria than the law specifies she would be accused of making law for the bench but because she applied the law as required she was accused of precisely that. If those accusations are not inescapable bias I know what it is!
I am by nature a conservative person and watching the vulgarity, lack of the most basic manners, uncivil behavior of GOP members of Congress that’s what did it for me: Judge KBJ impeccable manner and judicious answers made me not hesitant at all to say “ we need this woman in the Supreme Court”
The Supreme Court is not supposed to “look more and more like America”. That is politically correct madness by both political extremes. The Supreme Court is supposed to be nine of the very best-of-the-best impartial scholars/lawyers/judges in the USA regardless of race, sex, and creed. And that is a VERY tiny and extraordinarily exclusive group of Legal Elites who transcend the US population statistics. Average Americans are NOT elite. They are very average and ordinary by definition. We need the very best minds on the Court, and not just average Joe and Jane Schmos.
William Hitchens. Hear Hear
KBJ is considered to be one of the very best jurists in the US and with a honesty and judicial temperament to fit. So said so many of her peers including many republicans and ultimately the Senate.
There isn’t a jurist that’s better than all others. That is why presidents can nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate have a nominee approved. Amongst the many that could be nominated the President (be it a Republican or Democrat) chooses whoever he wants. It has always been like that (it’s in the Constitution) and it’s not about to change.
The Constitution reflects the values of the people, for the people and by the people, all of us different people-the diversity of us.
Judge K. Brown Jackson was a nominee that in the words of others(including prominent Republics “Ketanji’s intellect, her character, and her integrity, is unequivocal” . Her unique experience as a human being adds to her role.
Those who expect a human of any kind to be identified as “the best” maybe ripe for a dictatorship.
But I prefer it the way it is, if we can keep it that way ….
William Hitchens. Hear Hear