Supreme Court nominee Jackson meets with Rick Scott as White House seeks GOP support
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson met Tuesday morning with Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican who represents her home state of Florida, as the White House seeks to build bipartisan support for President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
Jackson, a federal appeals judge who grew up in South Florida and graduated from Miami Palmetto High School in 1988, will be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court if confirmed by the Senate.
She’ll require 51 votes in the 100-member Senate for confirmation, which Democrats can provide on their own through Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote. But Democratic leaders have repeatedly expressed their desire that the judge win bipartisan support when her nomination likely comes to the floor before the Senate’s April break.
“She met with Sen. Scott this morning,” Scott’s spokesperson McKinley Lewis confirmed to the Herald Tuesday morning without providing additional details of the judge’s conversation with the senator.
Scott’s meeting follows the judge’s discussions last week with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It also came the same day that Jackson met with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who is seen as one of the Republicans most likely to vote for the judge.
Scott’s closed-door meeting with Jackson took place with little fanfare in contrast to Schumer and McConnell’s meetings with the judge, which included brief portions that were recorded by C-SPAN. Scott’s meeting with Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 was recorded by C-SPAN unlike his sit-down with Biden’s nominee.
“I talked about what exactly I talk to judges about,” Scott told the Herald Tuesday afternoon about his meeting with Jackson, noting that he had appointed more than 400 judges during his two terms as Florida’s governor. “And it’s about are you going to be part of the judiciary or the legislative branch, and so I’m looking at her background.”
Asked whether he was satisfied with Jackson’s answers, Scott repeated that he was looking at the judge’s background.
Jackson, a graduate of Harvard Law School, served as a clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer, the retiring justice she’s been tapped to replace, early in her career and later worked as a federal public defender. She’s spent the last nine years on the federal bench, dating back to her 2013 appointment to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under President Barack Obama.
Scott voted against Jackson last year when she was elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit with support of every Senate Democrat and three Republicans, including Collins. The D.C. Circuit is widely seen as a launching pad to the Supreme Court.
Based on his past vote against Jackson, Scott is unlikely to back her confirmation to the high court, but Jackson’s Florida connections and the historic nature of her nomination may put pressure on the state’s two Republican senators to give her more consideration than another Biden nominee. Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida’s senior senator, has not yet scheduled a meeting with the judge.
The timing of Scott’s meeting is striking given that he is not a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee’s members have been given priority to meet with Jackson before hearings commence on March 21. However, Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, hails from the judge’s home state and serves on the Senate GOP leadership team.
Jackson’s prospects for Republican support
Asked about the meetings with Scott and other Republicans, White House press secretary Jen Psaki pointed to the bipartisan support Jackson had received during her three previous confirmation votes — for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and her current role on the D.C. Circuit.
“It’s up to them to decide who they’re going to vote for, of course, but she is somebody who has been confirmed three times by the Senate in a bipartisan manner. She is someone who has ruled in favor of Democrats and Republicans, served under Democrats and Republicans, and very much in the model of Justice Breyer,” Psaki told reporters on an Air Force One flight to Texas. “So, we believe she deserves bipartisan support.”
The three Republicans who supported Jackson for the D.C. Circuit include Collins, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Graham had vocally campaigned for Biden to choose federal Judge J. Michelle Childs, a South Carolinian, for the historic pick, which could complicate Jackson’s ability to win his support this time.
Collins met with Jackson for more than 90 minutes Wednesday afternoon. In contrast to Scott’s meeting, Collins drew a crowd of reporters for her meeting with the judge and allowed reporters to watch her welcome the judge to the office.
Jackson noted her Miami upbringing, jokingly telling the senator that it’s much warmer than Maine. Collins pointed to a large binder of issues she planned to ask Jackson about and reminded reporters as they were ushered out of the room that Jackson had gotten engaged to her husband, Dr. Patrick Jackson, in Collins’ home state of Maine.
More than an hour and half later, Collins emerged from the office and told reporters that she was impressed by Jackson’s credentials but would wait until after the hearings to make her decision on the nomination.
“I think it’s important to recognize that she has been confirmed three times now. So this is not a candidate who is a blank slate to us,” Collins said when asked about the timeline for a potential confirmation vote by April.
Collins said that she did not agree with every decision Jackson has made during her tenure on the bench, but she praised the judge’s approach to cases.
“What I did get from her is that she takes a very thorough, careful approach in applying law to the facts of the case and that is what I want to see in a Supreme Court judge,” Collins said. “Again, however, one never knows what’s going to come out in hearings, so I will withhold my judgment.”
Meeting with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz
Jackson was also scheduled to meet Tuesday with Sen. Ted Cruz, a member of the Judiciary Committee, the Texas Republican confirmed to the Herald.
Cruz, who argued multiple cases before the Supreme Court during his tenure as Texas solicitor general in the 2000s, declined to preview his questions for the judge.
“We’ll find out when we sit down,” said Cruz, who opposed Jackson’s appointment to the D.C. Circuit last year.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who met with Jackson the same morning as Scott, noted the Judiciary Committee’s familiarity with Jackson, who has been vetted three times in the past for federal positions. He said she has displayed both legal expertise and strength of conviction in those past appearances.
“I’m looking forward to that character and intellect persuading a number of my Republican colleagues to support her as well,” Blumenthal told reporters Tuesday.
Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican on the committee, told reporters Tuesday that the judge’s past confirmations don’t guarantee elevation to the high court. But Cornyn also acknowledged that there’s little that senators don’t already know about the judge’s record at this point.
“She’s pretty familiar to us just having gone through the confirmation process before, so I don’t expect any big surprises,” Cornyn said.
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 11:09 AM.
