Graham, Scott express disappointment Biden didn’t choose SC judge for Supreme Court
WASHINGTON (WCSC) - South Carolina’s two Republican U.S. senators reacted Friday morning to reports that President Joe Biden did not select a South Carolina judge to replace a retiring Supreme Court justice.
“The attacks by the Left on Judge [J. Michelle] Childs from South Carolina apparently worked,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said.
Biden announced Friday he will nominate federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, making her the first Black woman selected to serve on the high court.
Jackson, 51, once worked as one of Breyer’s law clerks early in her legal career. She attended Harvard as an undergraduate and for law school, and served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the agency that develops federal sentencing policy, before becoming a federal judge in 2013.
Graham said he expects “a respectful but interesting hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee” on Jackson’s nomination.
Sen. Tim Scott said he looks forward to meeting with Jackson and “thoroughly vetting her record.”
“As a fellow South Carolinian and the product of some of America’s finest public schools, I believe Judge Michelle Childs would have been an excellent nominee to our nation’s highest court,” he said in a statement. “I am disappointed that President Biden missed the opportunity to nominate a highly-qualified judge who would have garnered widespread bipartisan support.”
Earlier this month, Graham placed his support behind Childs, saying the fact that Childs did not attend Harvard or Yale was “a plus.”
“The Harvard-Yale train to the Supreme Court continues to run unabated,” Graham said.
Like Scott, Graham said he believed Childs “could bring the Senate together and probably get more than 60 votes.”
Childs has served as a U.S. District Court Judge for South Carolina since 2010 and previously served as a state trial court judge on the S.C. Circuit Court from 2006 to 2010. Childs earned her Juris Doctor from the University of South Carolina in 1991 and was just nominated to fill a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in December.
If Jackson is approved, she would be the current court’s second Black justice — Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative, is the other — and just the third in history.
Breyer, 83, is retiring at the end of the term this summer, so Jackson wouldn’t change the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Copyright 2022 WCSC. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved.
