In recent years, the process of selecting Supreme Court justices has become increasingly partisan and contentious. Both Democrats and Republicans have been accused of politicizing the process and trying to stack the court with judges who share their ideological views. This was once again on display during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Kentaji Brown-Jackson, a federal judge who has been nominated by President Joe Biden to fill a vacancy on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
During the hearing, several Republican senators asked questions that many observers felt were inappropriate and demonstrated a lack of seriousness about the task of selecting an unbiased Supreme Court. For example, Senator Ted Cruz asked Brown-Jackson whether she believed that the Second Amendment to the Constitution protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. This question seemed designed to provoke a predictable response from Brown-Jackson, who is widely seen as a liberal judge, and to score political points with conservative voters.
Similarly, Senator Josh Hawley asked Brown-Jackson whether she believed that Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that established a woman’s right to abortion, was correctly decided. This question was also seen as an attempt to extract a politically charged answer from Brown-Jackson.
These questions, and others like them, reveal that objectivity is simply a suggestion on the part of some Republican senators when it comes to selecting Supreme Court justices. Rather than focusing on Brown-Jackson’s qualifications, experience, and legal reasoning, they seemed more interested in scoring political points and promoting their own ideological agenda.
This is not to say that Democrats are blameless in this regard. In the past, Democratic senators have also asked questions that were seen as biased or leading, such as asking conservative judges whether they believed in the right to privacy or the right to same-sex marriage. However, in recent years, it is the Republicans who have been more aggressive in their questioning and more brazen in their attempts to stack the court with conservative judges.
This undermines the integrity of the Supreme Court as an impartial arbiter of the law. If senators are more interested in advancing their political agenda than in selecting judges who are committed to upholding the Constitution and the rule of law, then the court will become increasingly polarized and politicized. This is not what the American people want or deserve.