[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 61 (Wednesday, April 6, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2024-S2025]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                  Nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson

  Mr. President, I want to speak briefly to a great accomplishment that 
will occur in this Senate later this week: the confirmation to the U.S. 
Supreme Court of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
  As a member of the Judiciary Committee, I have lived through--I have 
endured--several confirmation processes. I will say, this is one that 
brings me some joy, a sense of lift that we are making history for this 
Chamber and for the Supreme Court.
  Justice Breyer, who has announced his intention to retire, is someone 
who has spent decades on the Federal bench, on the Supreme Court, and 
has lived up to the highest ideals of American jurisprudence; and I am 
confident Judge Jackson, as Justice Jackson, will continue in that 
tradition. She has, as we learned in our week of confirmation hearings, 
a deep understanding of the Constitution, a great sense of the balance 
and the role of a judge, limited to understanding the Constitution, 
law, and facts passed in front of her and with a limited role to decide 
the questions presented based on the law and the facts.
  We also got to hear about her family, her history, her experiences, 
her service, her impeccable legal credentials,

[[Page S2025]]

her service on the Sentencing Commission, her work as a trial and 
appellate court judge, her experience as a clerk at all levels of the 
Federal judiciary, and her time as a Federal public defender.
  She is a devoted daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend, and someone 
who is humble enough to say that she knows and loves the Constitution 
from which our freedoms flow. She stands on the shoulders of those who 
went before her--her parents, both proud HBCU graduates and the first 
in her family to go to college. Her uncles and her brother served in 
law enforcement, in the military. She is so well grounded in those 
institutions and traditions that have made our Nation great; and it 
fills me with confidence to know that a person of this skill, of this 
background, of this sense of judicial temperament--who endured a 
grilling that was, at times, tantamount to harassment by other members 
of the Senate Judiciary Committee--demonstrated her grace, her courage, 
and her integrity under sustained fire.
  I very much look forward to the votes we will take in this Chamber 
later this week, and I will be honored to vote to confirm Judge Ketanji 
Brown Jackson to be the next Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme 
Court.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.