President Joe Biden last month nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and expressed his hope that she would be quickly confirmed in a bipartisan manner with the support of at least a few Republican senators.
One GOP senator Biden may have anticipated receiving support from is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), but reports indicate that Graham will likely be a “No” vote on Jackson’s nomination, Just the News reported.
Graham’s apparent opposition to Jackson’s nomination likely stems from the fact that he had openly lobbied for Biden to nominate South Carolina District Judge Michelle Childs and is disappointed that she wasn’t chosen.
Apparent hard feelings over the perceived snub
The suspected hard feelings were immediately evident in a statement Sen. Graham had released immediately after President Biden had announced his nomination of D.C. Circuit Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court.
“If media reports are accurate, and Judge Jackson has been chosen as the Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Breyer, it means the radical Left has won President Biden over yet again,” Graham said at that time.
“The attacks by the Left on Judge Childs from South Carolina apparently worked,” he added. “I expect a respectful but interesting hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Harvard-Yale train to the Supreme Court continues to run unabated.”
Graham really wanted Biden to nominate Judge Childs
The situation doesn’t appear to have changed much since then, as The Hill reported that just last week Sen. Graham told reporters, “The reason Michelle Childs is not the nominee is because of a concerted effort by the left to take her down and that doesn’t sit very well with me.”
“Here’s the point: I was willing to get probably double-digit Republican support for somebody that would have been in the liberal camp from my state,” he continued in reference to Childs. “So they made a political decision to reject bipartisanship and go another way.”
Graham added that Biden “can pick anybody he wants and I can vote any way I want.”
Graham previously voted to confirm Judge Jackson
The media has largely viewed these separate remarks from Sen. Graham as an indication that, at the very least, he is leaning toward voting against Judge Jackson’s confirmation, the Washington Examiner reported.
That has, of course, prompted some accusations of hypocrisy on Graham’s part, given the fact that he has voted to confirm a majority of President Biden’s nominees to other positions and, in fact, even voted last year to confirm Judge Jackson to her current position on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
There is obviously still a possibility that Graham could change his mind after meeting with Jackson, and there are a handful of other relatively moderate GOP senators who could still vote to confirm her, so we will just have to wait and see how Jackson’s confirmation hearings play out in the coming weeks to know for sure how everybody will vote.
