Ketanji Brown Jackson’s & ‘Roe’: Her Confirmation Hearings Did Little to Make the Case for Abortion Law

We are about three months away from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which has the potential to overturn Roe v. Wade. Four months after that, voters will head to the polls in the midterm elections. But at this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, Democrats did surprisingly little to make the case for Roe.

Don’t take my word for it. Over at Slate, progressive legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick laments the “utter failure on the part of Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to connect this hearing to what is going to be a catastrophic series of progressive losses at the Supreme Court this term, and the almost staggering inability to lay out any kind of theory for progressive jurisprudence, or even a coherent theory for the role of an unelected judiciary in a constitutional democracy.”

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John McCormack

John McCormack is a former Washington correspondent for National Review and was a fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Ketanji Brown Jackson

We are about three months away from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which has the potential to overturn Roe v. Wade. Four months after that, voters will head to the polls in the midterm elections. But at this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, Democrats did surprisingly little to make the case for Roe.

Don’t take my word for it. Over at Slate, progressive legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick laments the “utter failure on the part of Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to connect this hearing to what is going to be a catastrophic series of progressive losses at the Supreme Court this term, and the almost staggering inability to lay out any kind of theory for progressive jurisprudence, or even a coherent theory for the role of an unelected judiciary in a constitutional democracy.”