Friday Reads: With Justices for All

Federal Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

Happy Friday Sky Dancers!

I am sorry to be so late today but I had a lot of errands to run this morning!  I even had the topic I wanted to cover today by last night but just couldn’t get to it until this afternoon! I’d like to introduce you to all the wonderful black women Judges that are potential Supreme Court Nominees.

The First on the list is Federal Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson who replaced Merrick Garland when he became AG. This is an excerpt from an NPR interview with her by Nina Totenberg last June.

BROWN JACKSON: I am a federal judge, which means people generally treat me with respect. But in the evenings, when I leave the courthouse and go home, all of my wisdom and knowledge and authority evaporates. My daughters make it very clear that as far as they’re concerned, I know nothing. I should not tell them anything, much less give them any orders, that is if they talk to me at all.

She’s got all the receipts and still gets “oh mother!” from her daughters!

From WaPo today:

Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was born in Washington, the daughter of two graduates of historically Black colleges and universities who instilled in her a sense that she could do or be anything she set her mind to, she recalled in a speech in March.

In June, Biden nominated Jackson to fill Merrick Garland’s seat on the D.C. Circuit after Garland was confirmed as attorney general. This fueled speculation that she was on the president’s shortlist for potential justices because the D.C. court is considered the second-most powerful in the country and because high court nominees are traditionally chosen from the federal appeals bench.

Jackson has clerked for Breyer and for two other federal judges. She attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and a law student, serving as an editor for the Harvard Law Review. And her experience as a public defender has endeared her to the more liberal base of the Democratic Party.

From Business Insider:

The US Senate confirmed Jackson in 2013 to the federal trial court in Washington, DC, where she served for eight years before Biden put her on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, a court that has served as a launch pad to the Supreme Court.

Jackson’s tenure as a federal district court judge was highlighted by an opinion in which she ordered former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn to comply with a House Judiciary Committee subpoena to testify as part of the first impeachment inquiry into the former president. In a more than 100-page opinion, she forcefully rejected the Trump administration’s claims that a president’s close advisers are absolutely immune to demands for testimony before Congress.

The decision made waves with a single line: “Presidents are not kings.”

Jackson brings not just experience on the federal bench but a background that the Biden administration has sought out in its push to fill judicial vacancies.

Before she served on the US Sentencing Commission and on the federal bench, Jackson— a Harvard Law School graduate — worked as an assistant federal public defender in the District of Columbia.

“There could not be a better choice than her. She’s extremely intelligent, very hard-working, and — most importantly in my line of work — she’s compassionate and truly cares about the individuals who come before her,” said Jon Jeffress, who worked with Jackson in the federal public defender’s office in Washington, DC.

Next on the list is Leondra Kruger. This is from the WaPo link above too.

Leondra Kruger, 45, is a California Supreme Court justice. At the U.S. Department of Justice, she served as deputy solicitor general, the federal government’s second-ranking representative in arguments at the Supreme Court, before becoming one of the youngest people ever nominated to the high court in California, taking her seat in 2015.

During her tenure in the Office of the Solicitor General, Kruger argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court, according to her court biography.

She has previously rebuffed offers from the White House to take a job in the administration.

This is from the Reuters Tweet above.

Before she turned to law and became one of the youngest justices ever appointed to the California Supreme Court, Leondra Kruger had journalism in her blood.

Kruger, considered a potential U.S. Supreme Court nominee for President Joe Biden to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, was editor-in-chief of her high school’s newspaper. Later, at Harvard University, she wrote for the daily student paper, the Crimson. While attending Yale Law School, she became editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.

The reputation she gained as a young journalist for being thoughtful and careful has followed her to the judiciary, where the 45-year-old jurist has become known for her incremental approach to deciding cases.

Her moderate approach might help her win confirmation in a U.S. Senate evenly split between Democrats and Republicans if Biden chooses her to replace Breyer. Kruger would make history as the first Black woman to serve on the top U.S. judicial body.

Vox has a deep list of impressive black women serving as judges that make for a very long and deep bench. Vox is looking strictly at women younger than 55 which automatically means Lawyer Sharon Ifill — the former President and Director of NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund–did not make their cutoff.

Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi

Here are the justices proposed by VOX.

Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi — whom Biden appointed to the Seventh Circuit, which oversees federal litigation in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin — is a Yale law graduate who clerked for a federal circuit judge before entering practice. Although she was a partner at a large law firm immediately before her elevation to the bench, she spent 10 years as a public defender.

Judge Eunice Lee of the Second Circuit,

Similarly, Judge Eunice Lee, a Biden nominee to the Second Circuit, also graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for a federal appellate judge (Lee clerked for Judge Eric Clay of the Sixth Circuit, who I also clerked for). She has more than two decades of experience arguing appeals for indigent criminal defendants.

Here’s more on Judge Lee from News One.

Christina Swarns, executive director of The Innocence Project, tweeted in support of Lee’s confirmation. Swarns called Lee “absolutely brilliant” and “an exceptional addition” to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Lee and Swarns previously served together at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York.

 Judge J. Michelle Childs, a federal district judge in South Carolina.

Judge Michelle Childs is getting a lot of attention for being from South Carolina and championed by Representative James Clyburn. She is still considered a long shot.

 Judge J. Michelle Childs, a federal district judge in South Carolina. Appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2009, Childs was the first Black woman to become a partner in one of South Carolina’s major law firms, according to the New York Times. She also held various positions in state government. Biden recently nominated her to a seat on the DC Circuit.

Childs’s best shot at a Supreme Court nomination stems from the fact that she has a powerful advocate. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior House Democrat who played a significant role in helping Biden win the presidential primary in South Carolina that reinvigorated his 2020 campaign, reportedly floated Childs as a potential Supreme Court justice.

The same New York Times article that reported Clyburn’s interest in Childs also mentioned two other names that “have caught the eye of lawmakers” — Danielle Holley-Walker, the young dean of Howard University’s law school, and Leslie Abrams Gardner, a federal district judge who is also the younger sister of Georgia politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams.

And, of course, there’s the Fox News Wipipo Outrage from their Talking Dickheads.

This is from the Huffpost link in the above Tweet. It’s written by Lee Moran.

“The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah on Thursday pointed out the basic flaw in an argument Fox News personalities are pressing against President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have led the chorus of criticism on the conservative network, claiming Biden’s pledge is “beyond extremely divisive.”

But being a Black woman isn’t the sole qualification for the job, Noah noted.

“Biden is going to pick a Black woman who is also qualified,” he said. “These people act like Biden is just going to show up to the mall and be like, ‘Yo, Shaniqua, come with me.’”

“And why not try to make the Supreme Court a little more representative of the country it represents?” the comedian asked. “I mean, their rulings impact the lives of every person in the country.”

From Chait at New York Magazine:

President Biden has not named his choice to fill Stephen Breyer’s vacancy on the Supreme Court, but the first major talking point against her has already emerged: She is the unqualified product of affirmative action.

“Biden has unwisely limited his options by preemptively declaring during the 2020 campaign that his first Supreme Court nominee would be a black woman,” editorializes National Review. “In a stroke, he disqualified dozens of liberal and progressive jurists for no reason other than their race and gender. This is not a great start in selecting someone sworn to provide equal justice under the law.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial page clucks, “Mr. Biden’s campaign promise that he’d appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court is unfortunate because it elevates skin color over qualifications.” Cato’s Ilya Shapiro complained, before deleting the tweet, “Because Biden said he’s only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached.” Even grosser versions of the same basic idea are already emanating from the likes of Tucker Carlson.

Somehow the idea has taken hold that, before Biden came along and junked the standards, nominations to the Supreme Court used to be awarded solely on the basis of merit. The pick would go to the finest and most accomplished jurist in the land, like a law review editorship for the entire court system.

But when exactly did this era exist? Was it before 1967, when the most qualified judges were all white men? No, there was widely held to be a “Jewish seat” and a “Catholic seat” on the Court for decades during that time.

The basis for identity representation on the Court widened after the 1960s. Ronald Reagan promised during his 1980 campaign to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. George H.W. Bush did not openly say he needed a Black jurist to replace Thurgood Marshall, but it would take heroic levels of delusion to believe Clarence Thomas was selected on the basis of his career accomplishments.

Their hypocrisy and ability to lie know no boundaries.

Meanwhile, I’ll be looking forward to hearing a lot more about these fantastic judges!

Have a great weekend!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Monday Reads

Robert Motherwell

Happy Monday Sky Dancers!

The Supreme Court continues to be the nightmare that right-wing Republicans intended it to be. Nearly all civil rights advances made in the last half of the century in this country are under attack.  The latest is affirmative action in higher education. Frankly, I think that white nationalists should be careful what they wish for on this topic because being one of those who just show up white guys and get rewarded is going to backfire on them.  I’ve been teaching graduate school for quite a while in math-heavy, tech-heavy finance, and economics. Few of them even get to the ABD stage. There are a huge number of American students that are a product of last century’s diasporas from Asia and the Middle East that can blow right past them with their math chops.  The lawsuit was filed by a group of Asian-American students.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a challenge to the use of race in college admissions decisions, teeing up a potentially landmark showdown over affirmative action in higher education.

The case arose after a conservative-backed group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, alleging the schools illegally discriminate against Asian American applicants.

The court’s announcement came in a brief order without noted comment or dissent. The cases, which have been consolidated, are expected to be heard during the court’s next term, which begins next fall.

The move rebuffed the Biden administration, which last month had asked the justices to turn away the challenge to Harvard University, arguing that the school’s admissions practices were lawful.

Harvard, in court papers, denied that its policy is discriminatory. The school accused SFFA of a brazen attempt to upend decades of precedent allowing schools to promote on-campus diversity by considering the racial makeup of their student bodies.

“Having failed to make the case that Harvard’s admissions practices contravene the court’s precedents governing the use of race in admissions, SFFA asks the court to overthrow them,” Harvard wrote in a filing last May. “But SFFA offers no legitimate justification for such an extraordinary step.”

SFFA alleges that Asian American applicants are held to a higher academic standard than other students. The group argues that Asian Americans are disadvantaged in the application process due to receiving lower “personal ratings” and are admitted at a lower rate than white applicants despite having higher test scores on average.

SFFA has asked the court to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of college admissions boards to factor in applicants’ race in order to benefit minority groups and enhance diversity.

“Grutter’s core holding — that universities can use race in admissions to pursue student-body diversity — is plainly wrong,” the group wrote in its petition for appeal. The challengers say their case against Harvard’s policy gives the court an “ideal vehicle” for reevaluating its stance on affirmative action given the school’s outsize role in past rulings.

The Italian Woman 1938 Georges Rouault

The suit is considered the most serious threat to affirmative action in decades according to NBC.

Despite similar challenges, the court has repeatedly upheld affirmative action in the past. But two liberal justices who were key to those decisions are gone — Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Their replacements, Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, are conservative and considered less likely to find the practice constitutional.

In the latest case, groups backed by a longtime opponent of affirmative action, Edward Blum of Maine, sued Harvard and UNC in federal court, claiming that Harvard’s undergraduate admissions system discriminated against Asian American students and that UNC’s discriminated against both Asian American and white students. Lower courts ruled that the schools’ limited consideration of race was a legitimate effort to achieve a more diverse student body.

The lawsuits were targeted to challenge the admissions process at both a private and a public university.

The Supreme Court has long barred racial quotas in admissions. But it has allowed schools to consider a student’s race to be one “plus factor” among many other qualities, provided the admissions process looks at the overall qualifications of applicants and uses race no more than necessary to achieve a level of diversity.

The challengers in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, urged the justices to overrule the court’s 2003 decision on affirmative action, which upheld the University of Michigan’s use of race as a plus factor and served as a model for similar admissions programs nationwide.

That decision “endorsed racial objectives that are amorphous and unmeasurable,” the challengers said in asking the Supreme Court to take their appeal. The Constitution requires equal protection and contains no exceptions, they said, contending that Harvard admits Asian Americans at lower rates than whites and values Black or Hispanic ethnicity more highly.

“If a university wants to admit students with certain experiences (say, overcoming discrimination), then it can evaluate whether individual applicants have that experience,” their brief said. “It cannot simply use race as a proxy for certain experiences or views.”

Munch: Brann på Grønland
Edvard Munch: “Brann på Grønland” (Fire at Grønland, a borough in Oslo), 1919-20.

Universities have long considered diverse student bodies–reflective of the country in its entirety–to be a good thing for higher education all around.  Geographic location is frequently used also to give all students a chance to see what life is like outside the vacuum where they were raised. Grades and tests scores are no longer considered the sole indicator of success at university and in life.

The Jane Mayer article at The New Yorker that I posted over the weekend on Ginnie Lamp Thomas and Clarence Thomas has become the center of controversy. It obviously put the couple in a bad light and frankly, I will argue they deserve it. But, I’ll leave that to Michael Tomasky writing for The New Republic. “The Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas. The Supreme Court justice refuses to recuse himself from cases in which his right-wing activist wife, Ginni, has a clear interest. The Democrats should punish him for it.”

In a sane world, Jane Mayer’s excellent piece on Ginni Thomas in The New Yorker would set off a series of events that would lead to her husband Clarence Thomas’s impeachment and removal from the Supreme Court. Ginni is involved with numerous far-right organizations and schemes that take very public positions on court decisions across a range of social and political issues, such as last week’s 8–1 holding that Donald Trump could not block the release of documents related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

Thomas was the lone dissenter in that case. His wife sat on the advisory board of a group that sent busloads of insurrectionists to Washington on January 6. In addition, she cheered the insurrection on Facebook. It’s just the most recent example where she has been involved in activities that directly or indirectly place her activism before the court, and her husband does not care how corrupt it looks.

They’ve been doing this for years. This first occasion was back in 2000, in a case Mayer doesn’t even go into, when it was revealed after that election that as a Heritage Foundation staffer, Ginni was screening résumés for the incoming Bush administration while the nation awaited a ruling from the court on the Florida recount. There was pressure then on Thomas to recuse himself.

A decade later, when the first major Obamacare case came before the court, it was widely noted that Ginni’s group, Liberty Central, called the law a “disaster” and urged repeal. Again, there were calls for Thomas to recuse.

He didn’t do so in either case. And in the first one, he was part of the 5–4 majority in Bush v. Gore, one of the most self-discrediting decisions in the court’s history.

So for 20 years, Ginni Thomas has been operating in the white-hot center of far-right activist circles, involved in everything from Obamacare to abortion rights to same-sex marriage to you name it—all issues that have come before her husband. A more honorable man would recuse himself from all such cases or indeed quietly ask his spouse to find another, less incendiary line of work that has no impact on the appearance of her husband’s ethical standards.

Dr Rosa Schapire 1919 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff 1884-1976 Presented by the executors of Dr Rosa Shapire 1954 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N06248

The article continues to point out what the Democratic party has done which is nothing and to point out what the Republicans would’ve done if it were a wife a Democratic supreme court justice doing this instead.  It’s a good long read.

There was one good finding from SCOTUS. “Supreme Court turns away Rep. Kevin McCarthy challenge to House proxy voting during COVID-19”  This is from USA Today and John Fritze.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a GOP lawsuit challenging proxy voting rules set up by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in response to the pandemic.

The decision to not hear the case lets stand a federal appeals court ruling that said courts are barred from reviewing the internal rules of the House of Representatives.

Weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the House approved a measure allowing lawmakers unable to come to Capitol Hill to designate another member as their “proxy” to cast floor votes on their behalf.

Republicans, led by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sued Pelosi, contending that the Constitution does not allow proxy votes. That argument rests in part on the quorum clause, which requires a majority of the House to be present in order to conduct the chamber’s business. That clause also says a group smaller than a quorum may be authorized to “compel” the attendance of “absent members.”

The power to compel absent members to attend would make little sense, McCarthy told the court, if the framers of the Constitution did not expect lawmakers to vote in person.

And, if you want to see angry white male in action try this one:

I feel for this man’s son whose peanut allegery was triggered by something in his smoothy but wow, this is no way to handle a complaint to a small business.

I’m not sure how far behind the Rolling Stone paywall you’ll get but this is another one of those things that is shocking about the insurrection. This was reported by Andy Kroll: Start the Steal: New MAGA Emails Reveal Plot to Hand Arizona to Trump

You also can read more at NBC News from  Jane C. Timm: Arizona Republicans propose major changes to elections after GOP review finds no fraud.

Arizona Republicans have put forth two dozen bills this month that would significantly change the state’s electoral processes after the GOP’s unorthodox review of millions of ballots affirmed President Joe Biden’s victory and turned up no proof of fraud.

Proposals introduced in the state House or the Senate would add an additional layer to the state’s voter ID requirement, such as fingerprints, and stipulate the hand counting of all ballots by default. Other legislation would require that paper ballots be printed with holograms and watermarks.

Republican legislators argue that the proposals, part an ongoing surge of GOP-led election changes enacted or under consideration across the country, are necessary to enhance election security and prevent fraud.

Official counts, audits and accuracy tests have confirmed the election results in Arizona and elsewhere without finding evidence of widespread fraud, and states with Republican and Democratic leaders have certified the results as accurate. Former President Donald Trump, who continues to promote the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, was unable to prove any of the claims in court. A coalition of federal agencies involved in election security, alongside representatives of election officials from each state, said the election was “the most secure in American history.”

The Legislature began its 2022 session on Jan. 12, and many of the bills have already been referred to committees for consideration. They face uncertain fates, as Republicans hold narrow majorities in the Senate, and a Republican, state Sen. Paul Boyer, said he would block bills he saw as unnecessary or problematic.

Some of the bills appear to be tied to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that were elevated in the widely criticized ballot review state Senate Republicans orchestrated last year. Election experts said Cyber Ninjas, the company the legislators hired to examine millions of ballots in Maricopa County, had little to no experience with handling ballots, appeared to be looking for proof of conspiracy theories and misrepresented normal election processes in its final report as suggestive of fraud. Cyber Ninjas is accruing $50,000 a day in fines for refusing to respond to a court order requiring it to turn over documents related to its work.

Other bills, like one that would ban automatic voter registration from being implemented, appear to be designed to pre-empt provisions in national Democrats’ election overhaul legislation, which has stalled in the Senate.

Arizon is serious about disenfranching voters.

Anyway, I have to prepare for a Derivatives Class for Wednesday night where I get to work with a diverse number of students from all over. It’s always enlightening for me and it’s good to see the number of graduate students come with all kinds of different skills and input.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?