Full beating of Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s candidate for the United States Supreme Court; acquaintances of the wife of ultra-conservative judge Clarence Thomas with the disturbed world of Donald Trump: the Republicans continue to sink to the right of the right – with sabotage, as a result, of the independence of the courts. The ideal would be for them to sink into it so as to bury themselves there, but that’s a lot to hope for from a political system whose rules are found to arm the antidemocratic designs of the Republicans.
Seven months before the mid-term legislative elections in the United States, the war in Ukraine more or less obscures their maneuvers. However, one is not fundamentally foreign to the other, so similar are the illiberal enterprise of Vladimir Putin and that of a Republican Party whose leadership recently decreed that the attack of January 6, 2021 on the Capitol constituted “legitimate political discourse”.
Joe Biden is making history by finally opening the doors of the Supreme Court to a black judge. And in fact, when announcing at the end of February the appointment of Mme Jackson, whose skills are indisputable, an elementary question of healthy representativeness of the forces of American society. Who can deny it? Of the 115 justices who have served on the Supreme Court since its inception, 107 have been white men, compared to two black men and five women (four white and one Hispanic). There were, of course, white judges who were more progressive than others. In this case, the appointment of Mr.me Jackson is all the more significant given that the Supreme Court today is weighed down by a majority of six conservative justices, largely captive to a literalist reading of the Constitution and far more to the right than ordinary Americans on a range of issues, starting with the right to abortion.
Mr. Biden also has things to be forgiven. As columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, this appointment may be a way for him to atone for the incompetence he showed in 1991, as chairman of the Senate committee, in the face of accusations of sexual harassment brought against Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill, a former assistant. A case where Mme Hill, now a law professor, had been dragged through the mud during the commission. And at the end of which the candidacy of the ultra-conservative Mr. Thomas, a black man, chosen by trick by George Bush senior, had been confirmed by a Senate with a Democratic majority, although by a narrow majority, despite the evidence of the fact that his professional skills left much to be desired.
The retrograde mentalities having the hard life, the republican inquisition with regard to judge Jackson on the part of several members of the commission, two weeks ago in the judicial commission, will therefore have been mixed with racism and sexism.
But it is above all, basically, against his open-mindedness and his constructive reading of the laws that these obtuse Republican ideologues have. Inquisition is not too strong a word: above all they will have sought to pass her off as a filthy leftist, with an inadequate religious faith, lax on crime and pornography, follower of “critical race theory”, this new Republican bogeyman. Questions, in short, that had little to do with his thinking and his legal qualifications.
This inquisition, alongside recent revelations about Virginia Thomas, shows how diehard these mercenaries of Trumpism are in their uninhibited enterprise of corrupting the rule of law.
Virginia Thomas, wife of Judge Clarence Thomas, is the notorious conservative and pro-Trump activist whose frantic calls for the cancellation of the “fraudulent” 2020 presidential election are contained in a series of texts she sent to the White House and which American media have recently got their hands on. Calls that immediately raise the question: what did her husband know? Asking the question is not far from answering it, given the community of spirit of the couple. In any case, the only appearances of conflict of interest and attack on the independence of justice are glaring. They should have caused Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the Supreme Court cases relating to the January 6 inquiry, which he did not even have the integrity to do.
It is unfortunate for the United States that President Trump has had the opportunity to appoint not one, not two, but three justices to the Supreme Court. Yesterday a minority, the pure and hard conservatism of Clarence Thomas is no longer. And the Supreme Court, because of partisan politicization, finds itself discredited like never before in American opinion. In the absence of reforms intended to depoliticize the institution (limit the mandates, in the first place), the arrival of Mme Jackson, whose appointment should be approved by the Senate before Easter, will not break the Conservative yoke, but his dissidence will certainly contribute to restoring some legitimacy to him.