Prior to the hearing, Judge Jackson had a 58% approval rating in a Gallup poll. And after nearly 24 hours of answering questions for two days, the percentage of respondents who said they would vote for her if they were senators rose from 64 percent to 72 percent in a national survey by Marquette Law School. Support for Jackson in the Marquette poll among black adults is currently 86 percent, among Hispanics it is 76 percent and for whites it is 59 percent — making her easily the most popular candidate for the Supreme Court since John Roberts went to the Supreme Court in 2005. With few exceptions, however, nearly half of the Senate is ready to vote against its affirmation, which makes history – revealing a disconnect with the wider sentiment in the country. This could well come back to bite the GOP at election time. Roberts was confirmed by a vote of 78 to 22. His acceptance rate at the time was 59 percent. Jackson, with more than equal prestige in the American public, is likely to receive no more than a handful of Republican votes – all eyes on Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who voted Jackson in Mitt District Court last summer. Romney of Utah and two retired senators who are no longer politically vulnerable (Rob Portman of Ohio and Richard Burr of North Carolina). It was big news when Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she would support Jackson. Collins has voted for every SCOTUS candidate since she was elected to the Senate in 1996, with one exception. He opposed Amy Connie Barrett’s hasty candidacy a week before the 2020 election for procedural reasons, a vote that was popular in Maine and that Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said she helped Collins re-elect in a race that Democrats they had largely calculated her defeat. Silver said Republicans take “a real risk” of blocking such a popular candidate, adding: “Reflective opposition to Supreme Court candidates may be the norm today, but that does not mean it is politically wise.” “The only rationale for the Republican Party’s general opposition to a well-qualified candidate with exceptional judicial temperament is the fear of being selected and the primary need for Trump voters to be locked in.” On the other side of the divide, Sen. Chuck Grassley (a Republican in the Justice Committee) faced the effects of the Republican Party’s line of inquiry as he met with voters in Iowa. A supporter told Grassley that he found the attempt to portray Jackson as soft on child pornographers “simply awful” and while voting for Grassley in the past (noting that he has been in power for almost fifty years and is the oldest man in the Senate) “Now comes the moment when I feel that you are not for the people, you are for the Party.” At 88, Grassley is running for re-election and has not yet revealed how he could vote when the Justice Committee meets Monday to send Jackson to the Senate. All 11 Democrats are united in their support for the equally divided committee, while none of the Republicans has announced their support. But their votes are not needed. Democrats can run on the floor on their own. Collins’s vote, along with that of 50 Democrats, allows President Joe Biden to seek bipartisanship and avoid a draw between Vice President Kamala Harris. Even so, how can this be? Given that we now know that Jackson will be confirmed, it is difficult to see the political benefit for any Republican with national aspirations to oppose a candidate who is popular on political, racial, and racial lines. Many black voters will likely see the Jackson affirmation vote as the most important vote a politician has in his career. Getting it wrong can be the end of your career. Nate Silver cites votes against Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the 2018 defeats of Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Joe Donnelly of Indiana — both representing states where Kavanaugh was popular. “How does a senator go back to his constituents and explain why they voted against her?” asked Dan Goldberg of the Alliance for Justice Action Campaign. “People will surely remember who was on the right side and who played partisan politics with this historic candidacy.” The only reason for the Republican Party’s general opposition to a well-qualified candidate with an exceptional judicial temperament is the fear of the election and the primary need to lock Trump voters. “The Republicans on the committee were not playing with the general public,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. “They played with Tucker Carlson’s bookers to have viral moments. Everyone wants to be the craziest voice in the room. “They do not want qualifiers and they desperately want attention.” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was arrested for checking his phone during the hearing to see how well one of his outbursts on social media went, as Republicans presented their preferred cultural issues for the FTH by-elections. “Can you define the word ‘woman,’” Republican Sen. Marsa Blackburn asked Jackson. When a confused Jackson refused, Blackburn regarded it as confirmation that it was in line with the kind of progressive education that Cruz and others portrayed as a democratic dogma. Republicans seem devilish to run into these issues of cultural warfare, and whether they will pay the price for their opposition to Judge Jackson’s historic confirmation will depend on the voters. However, Jack Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College, says he doubts these hearings will have the same impact on the country as Clarence Thomas’s hearings did in 1991. “We are still talking about Anita Hill. “I seriously doubt that in 30 years from now we will be talking about Josh Hawley’s weird questions,” he said, trying to link Jackson to Q-Anon conspiracy theories about Democrats and pedophiles. True, this can be bypassed-but not unless you’re a techie who knows what he’s doing. And we will probably not remember the names of Republicans who effectively voted against Judge Jackson’s confirmation. But in 30 years from now we will be talking about the first black woman on the field, her record, her decisions and how she opened the door for others to follow.
