U.S. Senate set to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to Supreme Court
Global News
The Senate is expected to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday, securing her place as the first Black woman on the high court
The Senate is expected to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday, securing her place as the first Black woman on the high court and giving President Joe Biden a bipartisan endorsement for his historic pick.
Three Republican senators have said they will support Jackson, who would replace Justice Stephen Breyer when he retires this summer. While the vote will be far from the overwhelming bipartisan confirmations for Breyer and other justices in decades past, it will still be a significant bipartisan accomplishment for Biden in the narrow 50-50 Senate after GOP senators aggressively worked to paint Jackson as too liberal and soft on crime.
“It will be a joyous day,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as he announced Thursday’s vote late Wednesday evening. “Joyous for the Senate, joyous for the Supreme Court, joyous for America.”
Jackson, a 51 year-old federal appeals court judge, would be just the third Black justice, after Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and the sixth woman. She would join two other women, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, on the liberal side of a 6-3 conservative court. With Justice Amy Coney Barrett sitting at the other end of the bench, four of the nine justices would be women for the first time in history.
After a bruising hearing in which Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee aggressively interrogated Jackson on her sentencing record, three GOP senators came out and said they would support her. The statements from Maine Sen. Susan Collins, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney all said the same thing _ they might not always agree with Jackson, but they found her to be enormously well qualified for the job.
Collins and Murkowski both decried the increasingly partisan confirmation process, which Collins called “broken” and Murkowski called “corrosive” and “more detached from reality by the year.”
Biden, a veteran of a more bipartisan Senate, said from the beginning that he wanted support from both parties for his history-making nominee, and he invited Republicans to the White House as he made his decision. It was an attempted reset from three brutal Supreme Court battles during President Donald Trump’s presidency, when Democrats vociferously opposed the nominees, and from the end of President Barack Obama’s, when Republicans blocked Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from getting a vote.
Before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, Jackson said her life was shaped by her parents’ experiences with racial segregation and civil rights laws that were enacted a decade before she was born.
The deadly haze covered monuments and high-rise buildings in the capital of New Delhi, with visibility so low that airlines warned of delays.
The death is being investigated by federal authorities but "the preliminary cause" has been ruled an accident.
The incident took place more than a month ago, on October 13, but it wasn't reported until the British tabloids got wind of the story.
Health officials said Saturday they have confirmed the first U.S. case of a new form of mpox that was first seen in eastern Congo.
Washington is easing limits on what Ukraine can strike with U.S.-made weaponry, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Ukraine plans to conduct its first long-range attacks in the coming days, sources said, without revealing details due to operational security concerns.
Concerns storm surges could raise water levels between one and three feet above ground level as Tropical Storm Sara makes landfall in Belize.
Air defenses could be heard engaging drones over Kyiv in the night, and a series of powerful blasts rang out across the city as the missile attack was under way in the morning.
John Kirton, head of the G20 Research Group, says the forum is the main tool countries have to prepare for the second Donald Trump presidency.
Israeli airstrikes on the village of Khreibeh in the Baalbek District of eastern Lebanon killed six people on Saturday, including three children the Lebanese health ministry said.
The APEC summit marked the end of trade talks that should lead to Canada signing a new deal with the world's fourth-most populous country next year.