(LifeSiteNews) — Three moderate-to-liberal Republican senators announced that they will vote to confirm D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, granting the coveted “bipartisan” imprimatur on President Joe Biden’s left-wing nominee to the top of the federal judiciary.
ABC News reported that Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah have all announced their intentions to vote for Jackson, all but guaranteeing she will be confirmed by the full Senate with little difficulty.
The pro-abortion Collins, who voted against Republican-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett and only confirmed Justice Brett Kavanaugh after being personally satisfied he posed no threat to Roe v. Wade, said last week that she has “concluded that [Jackson] possesses the experience, qualifications, and integrity” for a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court.
The pro-abortion Murkowski, the only Republican to oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation, said Jackson left “quite an impression” on her during confirmation hearings, where “she was put under some pretty, pretty intense scrutiny, and I think you saw grace under pressure there.” Murkowski went on to complain that “it is almost automatic where if it is a president who is not of my party puts forth a nominee I am somehow obligated to just barely even give consideration.”
But the defection to garner the most attention is that of Romney, a former Republican presidential nominee who claims to have converted to the pro-life cause in 2005, particularly in light of the fact that he opposed Jackson’s confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year.
I intend to vote in support of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. My statement: pic.twitter.com/uGaxx8sJn5
— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) April 4, 2022
“In her previous confirmation votes I had concerns about whether she was in the mainstream and having spent time with her personally and reviewing her testimony before Congress I became convinced that she is in the mainstream,” Romney claimed, without elaborating on his working definition of “mainstream” or explaining how it squares with the various details that have come to light since her latest selection.
Nominated by Biden to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court based in large part on her race and sex, after the urging of a coalition of “progressive” groups including MoveOn and Demand Justice, Jackson has drawn scrutiny for various aspects of her record and answers to senators that fall well outside the political mainstream, including her light sentencing in child pornography cases, claim that she cannot answer when human life begins, claim that she cannot “provide a definition for the word woman” because “I’m not a biologist,” and claim that she does “not hold a position on whether individuals possess natural rights.”
Left-wing activists clamored for the 83-year-old Breyer’s retirement for months so Biden could replace him with a younger like-minded jurist and prevent the possibility of a future Republican president using his vacancy to move the Court rightward. Jackson’s likely confirmation will not move the Court in a more left-wing direction, but will ensure that the seat remains filled by a liberal for potentially decades to come.
Jackson’s eventual confirmation was already a foregone conclusion in the narrowly Democrat-controlled Senate, but the defections of three Republicans is more than enough for Democrats to claim “bipartisan” support, enabling their public messaging efforts to present Jackson as more moderate than her record actually indicates.