(WASHINGTON, DC – 2/27/2022) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s largest umbrella group for American Muslim organizations, applaud President Joseph Biden’s nomination to the Supreme Court of U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. She is a historic choice and will be the first African American woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Her career as a former public defender is exemplary.
Judge Jackson, a 1996 Harvard Law School graduate, comes with the promise of challenging a dangerously reactionary 6-3 originalist/textualist judicial philosophy majority. This voting bias of the hyper-conservative judges on the Supreme Court over the past three-plus decades has occurred under the puppeteering hand of the ultraconservative Federalist Society.
Originalism and textualism is a theory stating legal thought and outcomes must hold to what the Constitution’s original framers – all white men, including many slaveholders – intended in their commonly vague phrasings of such key legal cornerstones as “freedom of speech,” “freedom of the press,” and other vitally enshrined rights. In practice, this bias has turned the Supreme Court into a fordizing conservative legal factory.
The results read out like a conservative manifesto from the power to choose political candidates over and against the expressed will of the public, to creating corporate personhood, to defunding unions, to dismembering the Voting Rights Act, to de-authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency to stop corporate practices that make the earth and people sick. In its latest conservative wizardry, originalists/textualists seek to empower the Supreme Court with the power of “non-delegation,” the right to declare any government regulation unconstitutional. In practice, this means that the whim of any particular Court’s bias will prevail over that of the elected representatives and the people that have deputized them.
In the nomination and anticipated appointment of Judge Ketanji places the hopeful prospect that competing legal theories of dynamic constitutionalism – philosophies that will free legal thinkers to intellectually engage the aims of the constitution to guarantee the liberties and privacy of the people over time and social change – will find rebirth – and so too, American doctrines of freedom, equality, and the reestablishment of limits against government and corporate profiling and interference in the personal lives of people.
USCMO and American Muslims wholeheartedly welcome the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson and stand by to support her swift appointment.
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