WASHINGTON (AP) – The Senate Judiciary Committee opened Supreme Court confirmation hearings Monday with pointed but courteous questions for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated for the nation’s highest court.
Jackson, 51, was to give her opening statement later Monday and answer questions on Tuesday and Wednesday from the panel’s 11 Democratic and 11 Republican senators.
Barring a significant misstep by the 51-year-old Jackson, a federal judge for the past nine years, Democrats who control the Senate by the slimmest of margins intend to wrap up her confirmation before Easter. She would be the third Black justice, after Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, as well as the first Black woman on the high court.
“It’s not easy being the first. Often, you have to be the best, in some ways the bravest,” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee chairman, said in support shortly after the proceedings began.
Democrats sought to preemptively rebut Republican criticism of her record on criminal matters as a judge and before that, as a federal public defender and a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission.