National

It’s official: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will be a Supreme Court justice, following a 53-47 confirmation vote in the Senate on Thursday.

Why it matters: She’ll be the first Black female justice in the court’s history, and the first justice to have served as a public defender. But as a member of the court’s diminished liberal wing, Jackson will likely be on the losing end of a lot of big cases for a long time.

The big picture: Notwithstanding a circus-like confirmation hearing, Jackson’s nomination has been smooth. Her confirmation was never really in doubt, and she secured some bipartisan support. Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney all voted to confirm her.

Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the vote. After gaveling the vote and making the confirmation official, senators broke out into sustained applause. 

The whole process, from her nomination on Feb. 25 to her confirmation Thursday, took just 42 days, well below the modern average.

Jackson joined President Biden at the White House to watch the results of the Senate vote, per the press pool. 

What’s next: Justice Stephen Breyer will stick around until the court’s current term ends this summer. Breyer, not Jackson, will participate in this term’s big rulings, including a landmark abortion case that could spell the end of Roe v. Wade.

Jackson will begin hearing cases when the next term begins in October.

The court has already teed up several politically charged cases for its next term. 

The biggest blockbuster so far is a challenge to affirmative action in college admissions, but Jackson has said she would recuse herself from at least part of that case, because it concerns admissions policies at Harvard and she is a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers.

What we’re watching: As the most junior justice and one of only three justices appointed by a Democratic president, Jackson won’t be writing any major rulings any time soon. But one of her biggest chances to make a mark on the court may come from criminal cases.

She will be the only justice with any real experience defending people who have been accused of a crime. That’s an extremely relevant background as the court decides plenty of cases about criminal defendants’ rights and the processes that police and prosecutors must follow.

And at times, those cases can scramble traditional ideological divisions on the court.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to say Ketanji Brown Jackson will be the first public defender to serve on the Supreme Court. 

Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as first Black female Supreme Court justice

She not only makes history as the first Black woman on the court but also as first justice in decades to have served as a public defender.

Picture of Joe Biden and Ketanji Brown Jackson hugging

President Biden embraces Ketanji Brown Jackson moments after the U.S. Senate confirmed her to be the first Black woman to be a justice on the Supreme Court in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on April 7. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Supreme Court

Politics & Policy

A pile of big, polarizing cases is already waiting for Ketanji Brown Jackson at the Supreme Court.

The big picture: Jackson will take her seat on the court just as it's diving headfirst into the most controversial issues in American politics — and at a moment when its conservative majority is poised to lock in victories that the right has been chasing for years, sometimes decades.

Driving the news: Jackson will start hearing cases when the court's next term begins in October. And even with only about a dozen cases on the docket so far, that term is already shaping up to be a dramatic one. 

Affirmative action: The use of race in college admissions has seemed to be on thin ice at the Supreme Court for years, and this term may be the final nail in the coffin.

The court is set to hear challenges to the admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Both schools give added weight to Black and Hispanic applicants; the lawsuits say that’s a form of discrimination against Asian Americans.

Three of the court’s six conservative justices voted in 2016 to strike down the affirmative action program at the University of Texas. The other three weren’t on the court at that point.

The Harvard and UNC cases not only ask the court to throw out these specific programs, but also to overturn its own precedent and close the door on all uses of race in the admissions process.

Jackson said during her confirmation hearings that she’d recuse herself from the Harvard case, due to her affiliation with the school.

Same-sex marriage: Remember a few years ago, when a baker who refused to bake cakes for same-sex weddings took his case all the way to the Supreme Court? The justices punted in that case, but it seemed pretty clear that future plaintiffs in the baker’s situation were likely to win their cases.

The court will hear a suit in its next term filed by a graphic designer who wants to make wedding websites, but not for same-sex weddings. She lives in Colorado, and Colorado law says businesses that are open to the general public can’t turn away customers because they’re gay.

The court will debate whether there should be an exception to accommodate business owners’ religious objections to same-sex marriage. 

While every case presents unique questions, in general, the court almost always sides with people looking to more freely live by their religious beliefs.

Over the past several years, the justices sided with a Muslim employee who was told not to wear a headscarf, a Muslim inmate who wasn’t allowed to grow a beard and a Christian company that objected to providing birth control to its workers. 

Voting rights: When Alabama drew new boundaries for its congressional districts last year, it ended up with one majority-Black district and smaller numbers of Black voters dispersed through several other districts. Critics sued, calling it an illegal act of racial gerrymandering.

A trial court agreed, and told the state to draw a new map. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, allowed Alabama to leave its district lines in place while the courts sort out whether those lines are illegal.

Alabama will be able to carry out its primaries this year before the court reaches a ruling on the merits.

This case matters not just for Alabama, but as part of the court's approach to voting rights cases overall. 

What’s next: Before Jackson even takes her seat, the court is expected to significantly roll back abortion rights — which would open the door to a flood of new state laws that restrict the procedure.

The inevitable challenges to those laws would mean that abortion could come back to the Supreme Court relatively often over the next several years.

Jackson joins a Supreme Court at fever pitch

She'll join the court as it dives headfirst into the most controversial issues in American politics.

Photo illustration of Ketanji Brown Jackson surrounded by shapes and image of the Supreme Court building

Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A pile of big, polarizing cases is already waiting for Ketanji Brown Jackson at the Supreme Court.The big picture: Jackson will take her seat on the court just as it&#x27;s diving headfirst into the most controversial issues in American politics — and at a moment when its conservative majority is poised to lock in victories that the right has been chasing for years, sometimes decades.

Everything about last night's leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade is staggering.

Driving the news: Politico posted a story reporting that the court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — and published a leaked draft of that majority opinion, written by Samuel Alito.

If this is in fact how the court ultimately rules, abortion would immediately become illegal in at least 13 states, and more would almost certainly follow. New restrictions in other red states would make the procedure difficult to actually obtain even in many places where it might technically remain legal.

Women in some parts of the country, particularly the South, would have to travel hundreds of miles to reach an abortion clinic. That would disproportionately disadvantage poor women and women of color.

Even just a few months ago, there seemed to be a realistic chance the court would significantly constrain the right to an abortion without eliminating it altogether, at least in one fell swoop. But the draft Politico published says that "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start."

This draft — which is not necessarily final, but which is labeled as the opinion of the court — does not adopt any sort of reasonable-people-differ-but-here’s-the-law approach. It is a broadside.

This is the first time in modern history that a ruling has leaked before the court issued it publicly. 

Our thought bubble: These are the kinds of leaks you see in normal, electoral politics — from campaigns, from Congress and at times from within the executive branch. In those contexts, they're usually an effort by the leaker to either stop something from happening or embarrass the people who made it happen.

Remember that shortly after Chief Justice John Roberts voted to uphold Obamacare, the fact that he had changed his vote late in the process leaked quickly after the court announced its ruling. 

The bottom line: The immediate, potentially life-altering implications for millions of women would be enormous. For the court to so thoroughly and unreservedly toss out its own precedents would have history-altering implications for that institution. 

Nothing is final here. This leak will unleash months of intense public and political pressure on the justices to take a narrower tack.

Politico reported that five justices had voted initially to overturn Roe — Justice Sam Alito, who wrote the opinion, and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. 

CNN's Joan Biskupic quotes sources as saying Chief Justice John Roberts doesn't want to completely overturn Roe v. Wade — meaning he apparently will dissent, likely with the court's three liberals.

Democrats will spend the next several weeks hoping to peel a vote away from that majority or to push the court to adopt a more incremental ruling. 

That could work, but if five justices are willing to go this far, this fast, right now, then all Democrats can hope for would likely be to delay the inevitable. 

🏛️ New push on filibuster: Democratic candidates across the country are demanding the Senate eliminate the filibuster rule — then use 50 votes (plus Vice President Harris' tie-breaker) to pass a bill that would codify abortion rights into law.

Moderate Democrats, including Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have been staunchly opposed to nixing the filibuster. But progressives hope the Roe v. Wade bombshell will turbocharge momentum in the 50-50 Senate.

Supreme Court leak stuns nation

Everything about the leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade is staggering.

MSNBC screenshot of Politico Supreme Court article

Everything about last night&#x27;s leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade is staggering.Driving the news: Politico <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="posted a story" data-vars-click-url="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473" data-vars-content-id="7488063e-69e5-4de7-b371-6c472e7c4e9d" data-vars-headline="Supreme Court leak stuns nation" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473" target="_blank">posted a story</a> reporting that the court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — and published a leaked draft of that majority opinion, written by Samuel Alito.

The Supreme Court keeps getting more powerful, but confirmation hearings for new justices consistently fail to match the gravity of what's at stake.

Why it matters: Nine people have the final say on all the biggest and most controversial issues in America — abortion, marriage, health care, immigration, voting rights, the boundaries of free speech. 

But what’s supposed to be Congress' one chance to vet those people on their way to a lifetime appointment is instead usually an exercise in obfuscation, point-scoring and grandstanding.

Driving the news: Republicans pelted Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson this week with questions about culture-war issues that are a lot more relevant to the midterms than to the court’s work.

“Do you agree … that babies are racist?” Sen. Ted Cruz asked during a series of questions about critical race theory and schools.

“Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Sen. Marsha Blackburn later asked. Jackson said she could not.

Flashback: During Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s hearings, Democrats spent a great deal of time and energy focused on health care, even invoking personal stories of people covered by the Affordable Care Act.

And, yes, there was a case pending before the Supreme Court about the ACA, just as there may one day be another case about trans rights. But there was also an election just a few months away, in which the legal threat to the ACA was a big part of Democrats' message. 

The big picture: Television, followed by social media, turned these serious-business hearings into an irresistible platform for senators to indulge their personal or partisan ambitions. Nominees have learned the lesson from the failed nomination of Robert Bork, whose nomination was defeated because of the many hard-line opinions he was willing to discuss publicly.

The Supreme Court’s work is complex, and literally life-or-death in some cases. Judges nominated to the high court come before the Senate with a record of judicial decision-making. Yet the process rarely shines much new light on anything.

The nominee tries to escape without saying anything. The majority party lobs up softball after softball. The minority party tries to sink the nominee if it can, but usually has to settle for trying to score some short-term points. 

Yes, but: When senators train their attention on substantive legal questions — which does happen, even though they’re rarely the attention-grabbing moments in these hearings — they don’t usually get very far. 

Modern nominees’ aim is to get through their hearings without saying anything particularly interesting about the law, and most of them succeed.

Abortion always takes up a big chunk of these hearings, but every exchange follows the same script: Senators will try to pin the nominee down on which precedents are the good precedents and which precedents are the ones that can be overturned; the nominee will hew and haw and ultimately say that precedent definitely does exist, but that they can’t speak to live controversies.

What they’re saying: Years before she became a Supreme Court justice, then-professor Elena Kagan had some particularly tough criticism for the say-nothing era of confirmation hearings, calling them “a vapid and hollow charade.”

“Such hearings serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government,” Kagan wrote in 1995. “Neither can such hearings contribute toward an evaluation of the Court and a determination whether the nominee would make it a better or worse institution.”

It’s hard to argue that the process has gotten better since then.

The Senate's Supreme Court charade

Short-term wins overtake decades-long consequences.

Illustration of a hand giving a thumbs up, with the thumb wearing a dunce cap. 

The Supreme Court keeps getting more powerful, but confirmation hearings for new justices consistently fail to match the gravity of what&#x27;s at stake.Why it matters: Nine people have the final say on all the biggest and most controversial issues in America — abortion, marriage, health care, immigration, voting rights, the boundaries of free speech.

Data: Axios/Ipsos poll; Chart: Thomas Oide/Axios 

Mask mandates in airports weren’t actually bothering Americans too much, according to Ipsos polling.

The big picture: While the end of masking requirements for airlines and many airports was reportedly greeted with applause, this poll shows that most Americans — and even most Republicans — were fine with mask requirements and are largely unmoved by their demise.

Details: In a surprising departure from the strict partisan divides we usually see on COVID, Democrats, Republicans and independents are all basically on the same page. 

Democrats and independents support mask mandates by much wider margins than Republicans, but most Republicans are still on board.

57% of Republicans, for example, said they supported mask requirements in airports (compared to 75% of independents and 91% of Democrats). Majorities also said they support requiring masks on planes, on trains and when riding public transit.

When it comes to actual behavior, though, that bipartisan agreement starts to wane.

Just 34% of Republicans said they're very likely to keep wearing masks on planes even though they no longer have to — compared to 58% of Democrats and 46% of independents.

Majorities in all three categories said they haven’t been on a plane since the pandemic began.

Asked whether the removal of mask mandates would change their willingness to fly, most Republicans (51%) and independents (53%), along with a plurality of Democrats (45%), said it wouldn’t make a difference. 

Methodology: Ipsos conducted this survey April 19-20. It is based on a sample of 998 adults, who were interviewed online. The poll has a credibility interval of ± 3.8 percentage points for all respondents, ± 7.5 percentage points for Republicans, ± 6.5 forDemocrats and ± 6 for independents/others.

Poll: Most Americans support mask mandates on airplanes

Few Americans said they oppose the policies.

Coronavirus

Mask mandates in airports weren’t actually bothering Americans too much, <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="according to Ipsos polling" data-vars-click-url="https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/for-many-changes-mask-requirements-planes-dont-impact-their-plans-fly" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/for-many-changes-mask-requirements-planes-dont-impact-their-plans-fly" target="_blank">according to Ipsos polling</a>.The big picture: While the end of masking requirements for airlines and many airports was <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="reportedly greeted with applause" data-vars-click-url="https://apnews.com/article/biden-health-business-travel-tampa-3408cc825582126fbda5fbedd3a49dd3" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://apnews.com/article/biden-health-business-travel-tampa-3408cc825582126fbda5fbedd3a49dd3" target="_blank">reportedly greeted with applause</a>, this poll shows that most Americans — and even most Republicans — were fine with mask requirements and are largely unmoved by their demise.

The U.S. faces a range of health care flashpoints — unaffordable drugs, opioids, vaping — as we debate whether to adopt universal care. For now, the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land, but Republicans want to issue it a final death blow.

Sections

Axios Local

Axios gets you smarter, faster with news & information that matters.

About

Subscribe

Sam Baker

Stories

Supreme Court leak stuns nation

Poll: Most Americans support mask mandates on airplanes

Jackson joins a Supreme Court at fever pitch

Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as first Black female Supreme Court justice

The Senate's Supreme Court charade