(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) President Joe Biden has taken credit for nominating the first black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court, but he killed former President George W. Bush’s nomination of Janice Rogers Brown, who would have been the first black woman on the court.
Biden first opposed Brown’s nomination in 2003, when Bush nominated her to serve on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, appointment to which has historically led to Supreme Court nominations, according to the Washington Post.
Brown was an associate justice of the California Supreme Court for seven years after she worked her way through UCLA law school as a single mother.
Biden led a filibuster, which he has since called a “Jim Crow” relic, along with other Senate Democrats to oppose Brown’s nomination and other Bush nominees.
The Democrats labeled her a conservative extremist, even though she wrote the most majority opinions on the California Supreme Court and won reelection with 76 percent of the popular vote.
Robert Novak, a Democratic journalist, described Biden’s filibuster as “the first full-scale effort in American history to prevent a president from picking the federal judges he wants.”
Brown lost the first nomination fight, but the Democrats relented and allowed the Senate to confirm her nomination on a 56-43 vote in 2005. Biden voted against her both times.
After her confirmation to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement, Bush announced that Brown was a top pick.
Biden came onto CBS’s “Face the Nation” to warn Bush that he would filibuster Brown’s nomination.
“I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered,” he said.
In the interview, Biden did not promise to filibuster Bush’s nominee no matter what, but he did single out Brown as a nominee who would guarantee a filibuster.
Although the Democrats allowed her confirmation to the appeals court, Biden said that a Supreme Court nomination is a “totally different ballgame” because “a circuit court judge is bound by stare decisis. They don’t get to make new law.”
The Supreme Court cannot make new laws, either.
“Biden wanted to make a black woman the first in history to have her nomination killed by filibuster,” Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen wrote.
