I have no problem with Ketanji Brown Jackson’s résumé, which is fine, and I have no problem with her character, either. Like Andy, my objection to her nomination lies entirely with her philosophy. Still, this graph from the Washington Post did make me laugh:
This isn’t a broadly applicable chart on which Jackson just happens to excel; this is a chart that has been reverse engineered so that Jackson hits every box. The authors include “Sentencing commission” because it applies to Jackson, but they leave out “Office for Civil Rights” because that would help Justice Thomas. “Public high school” is on there because Jackson went to one, but so is “Ivy League Law School,” which, despite the frequent complaints about the incestuousness of the Court, must in this case be cast as a positive. There’s nothing at all wrong with being a public defender, but the fact that Kagan and Sotomayor had no experience in that area was obviously not held against them when they were nominated, and neither was the fact that Kagan had had no courtroom experience whatsoever. As for “Supreme Court clerking,” if it didn’t apply — as it didn’t for Sotomayor or Thomas — it would probably be deemed a selling point (“she’s an outsider, to whom the Ivy League-to-clerkship-to-SCOTUS pipeline doesn’t apply!”), but, of course, Jackson clerked for Justice Breyer, so it’s needed here as a plus. How convenient that it all works out so well!
The box that’s notably missing is the one that matters the most: “Fidelity to the Constitution as Written.” Still, a boy can dream.