By John F. Di Leo - 
Once Associate Justice Stephen Breyer was successfully hounded into announcing his retirement (and we all wonder if the full story of that announcement will ever be told), Joe Biden announced that he would only be considering black females for the appointment.
Mr. Biden chose a tumultuous week to announce that name – a week in which Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices hit new records, the stock market tumbled, and the news was finally starting to circulate that indictments were finally coming on the Obama-Clinton era “Russian collusion” hoax against President Trump.
When the Biden-Harris regime most needed a distraction from all this, it hoped that a nice, high-profile “diversity hire” would turn the American mind toward something more positive.
The first judge nominated to fill Justice Breyer’s shoes is Ketanji Brown Jackson, and she meets Joe Biden’s rather brief list of qualifications perfectly: She is indeed a black woman.
The problem, of course, is that she does not meet the American people’s list of qualifications.
The American people do not care whether a justice is black or white, male or female, young or old, short or tall.
In fact, the very Supreme Court she seeks to join has occasionally declared that such conditions as Mr. Biden set are not even allowed to be considered in a hiring process. In the private sector, if a hiring manager tells his HR department that he’s looking specifically for a black person or a white person for this new job, or that he insists that HR find him a woman for this job or a man for this other job, then, unless he has a darned good reason, HR is going to have to arrange a meeting between this bozo and the company’s law department to set him straight on the rules.
In fact, the American people are much more broad-minded about the Supreme Court than some politicians give them credit for:
Leftists always liked both Ruth Ginsberg and Thurgood Marshall equally. Conservatives always loved both Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas equally. The issue for an American voter or “court-watcher” is whether a justice votes right, and writes decisions one respects, or if the justice votes wrong, and writes decisions one detests. That’s what matters. That’s all that matters.
The Biden-Harris regime is clearly completely unfamiliar with the legal principle that “justice is blind.”
This old image – visualized for 500 years by such cultural icons as the portraits and statues of a blindfolded “Lady Justice” holding the scales – is not just about the participants in a case; it’s about the judge too. A judge in our federal system must be an impartial arbiter, relying on the Constitution of the United States and the relevant body of federal law (and of the states too, when appropriate). There is no reason on earth why a judge’s sex or skin color should have anything to do with his or her ability to read and apply the law.
The Biden-Harris regime is confident about Ketanji Brown Jackson because Democrat nominees are always rubber-stamped by their own party, and they believe that a number of Republicans will be too afraid to vote against a black female appointee to deny them a healthy majority, especially since she has twice been confirmed for lower positions.
The regime may be mistaken on that note, however.
The US Senate’s Democratic caucus largely hails from states that are currently suffering from an unforgivable spike in crime.
Blue states with big cities – like California, Illinois, Minnesota and New York – have been watching their crime rates rise, concurrently, exactly as one would expect, with such foolhardy policy positions as immediate zero-bail releases of criminals back into the community… the outright refusal of state’s attorneys to prosecute most criminals at all… ridiculously low jail sentences when convictions are finally, miraculously obtained… and even mass prison releases by governors who feel so much more compassion for convicted criminals than for their victims that they jump on any excuse to throw open the prison gates and let people out, long before their time is up.
In this environment, when many of these very senators are up for reelection in a year predicted to be the greatest of red waves, one must ask whether a woman who has spent her life campaigning for the release of convicted criminals was really the best choice for an embattled White House that’s already clearly failing at every effort it has taken on.
The sterling example her supporters bring up is her help for her uncle, Thomas Brown Jr, in getting his lifetime sentence “for a nonviolent cocaine conviction” commuted. They say it that way to give the impression he was over-sentenced, but it was the result of a “three strikes” law. His prior convictions had included such crimes as carrying concealed firearms, heroin and cannabis possession, and drug paraphernalia. This last felony, triggering the life sentence, was for trafficking in large amounts of cocaine, specifically, being caught receiving for resale a package containing 14 kgs (about 31 lbs) of the deadly powder.
It is no longer fashionable to recognize the damage that the drug trade does to our country. It is particularly unfashionable to remind people that those involved in drug trafficking are destroying the very lives of the addicts who purchase their poison. But whether it’s fashionable or not, you don’t help the minority community by setting free the villains who pump their neighborhoods full of cocaine and heroin. You do them no favors by returning the drug cartels’ foot soldiers to the streets. It is anything but a victimless crime.
But this is Ketanji Brown Jackson’s background. Raised in a family of lawyers, attending the “best” schools, performing lots of pro bono defense work on behalf of the criminals who endanger the lives of people who can’t afford to live in gated communities and work in office buildings with dozens of security guards like she does.
Her legacy on the United States Sentencing Commission is one of keeping criminals from doing time at all, or, failing that, reducing their sentences so they are returned to their neighborhoods sooner, to again terrorize their communities as they did before.
In a nation in which almost all crime is caused by recidivists, one would think we would have learned this lesson by now, but too many simply refuse to acknowledge reality.
Frequently reversed by higher courts on grounds of judicial overreach, Ketanji Brown Jackson has not merely laid the groundwork for opposition saying they suspect her of bad judgment, her record virtually announces that she will indeed be exactly what America does not want: an activist justice on the Supreme Court, the one place where there is no higher court to undo the results of her bad judgment.
Her nomination itself is understandable; she sides with criminals against their victims, exactly as her party does.
But they are on the wrong side of the American public on this point, as well as being on the wrong side of the law. One hopes that the nation is paying attention, and that even some Democrat Senators will consider the optics of elevating someone from the wrong side of the war on crime for a post on America’s highest court.
This was an opportunity for the Biden-Harris regime to step outside their usual pattern, and appoint a unifier, a respectable moderate whom the American people could support. But nothing was further from their minds; the prospect of putting another radical on the high court had them salivating at the opportunity.
At 51, she could easily be on the court, poisoning future decisions with her ingrained disrespect for the Constitution and fondness for criminals, for another thirty or forty years.
The Supreme Court should be on the side of the Constitution. It should be on the side of the law-abiding citizen against the criminal.
The Supreme Court should be on the side of the people of Chicago and Los Angeles, New York and Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore… standing tall in opposition to the carjackers and flash mobs, the drug gangs and drive-by shooters, who are destroying their cities, night by night, bullet by bullet.
In truth, the very first to stand in opposition to Ms. Brown Jackson ought to be the Democrat senators from these embattled states. These states’ senators ought to rise above partisanship, and support their constituents, rather than continuing to serve as a rubber stamp for their addled leader.
It may not be likely today, but independence of thought, and real action on behalf of their home states, are exactly what these senators' voters have every right to expect from them.
Copyright 2022 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
