When the Supreme Court began its 2022-23 term this past Monday, black Americans celebrated the investiture of Ketanji Brown Jackson as an associate justice of the Court and called it an historic breakthrough. A black woman was sitting on the Court for the first time! She gives black women a voice on the highest court in the land. What a joyous occasion!
Geraldine Ferraro, though the 1984 Democratic nominee for Vice President, not only wasn't elected Vice President, she couldn't get elected to anything after that. Ketanji Brown Jackson is on the Court, she wasn't passed over, and she achieved what Geraldine Ferraro didn't - getting a seat at the table - but it doesn't matter because, in the end, she's still a liberal jurist on a court dominated by right-wingers.
Yes, she argued forcefully for the parameters of the Clean Water Act concerning wetlands, as they are the sources of many of our rivers, and yesterday she explained how race-neutral districting denies minorities representation because while the districts may be race-neutral, the population distribution in the states is, well, not. She doesn't have to tell that to people who already get that. She has to persuade the conservative supermajority on the Court. Not going to happen. And her most eloquent argument against the independent state legislature theory will likely not stop the right-wing supermajority from decided that the Constitution, giving the states the right to decided how to pick presidential electors any way they please, can nullify the popular vote for President on the mere suspicion of fraud and pick the electors the people did not choose.
And when martial law is declared by the Dear Leader Republicans put in the White House in January 2025, Ketanji Brown Jackson's distinction as the first black woman on the Supreme Court will hardly matter when she's arrested as an enemy of the state.
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