Republicans have already used her nomination to go after Democrats for being too “radical.”
There’s very little reason to doubt Ketanji Brown Jackson will be confirmed and become the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice. She doesn’t need to garner any Republican support in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and her ascension in place of retiring Justice Stephen Breyer won’t shift the ideological makeup of the court.
But this week’s hearings to vet the historic nominee will provide a platform for both Democrats and Republicans to send political messages, and that’s what they’re signaling they will do.
For Democrats, it’s an opportunity to confirm a historic new member to the Supreme Court, help President Joe Biden deliver on a big promise he made to Black voters during the campaign, and make the case for some Republicans to support her, too. For Republicans, it’s a chance to use Jackson’s nomination, and the support she’s gotten from liberal groups like Demand Justice, to question whether Democrats are too far to the left and “soft on crime.”
“I think [Republicans’] focus is going to be trying to accuse Democrats and Biden of being pro-crime, to try to obscure the dark money history of their last three nominees with a lot of smoke about her supposed dark money history,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told Vox. “I think she’s less going to be the target than us, and they’ll be pivoting off her to make points for November.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) signaled as much in a recent floor speech about Jackson’s nomination. “We need to explore why the farthest-left activists in the country desperately wanted Judge Jackson in,” McConnell said. “Liberals are saying that Judge Jackson’s service as a criminal defense lawyer and then on the US Sentencing Commission give her special empathy for convicted criminals.”
When and how to watch Jackson’s hearings
The hearing will air Monday, March 21, through Thursday, March 24, beginning at 11 am on Monday and 9 am on subsequent days. It will be accessible via a livestream on the Senate Judiciary Committee website, as well as via C-SPAN.
The panel begins Monday with statements from each senator on the committee, as well as an introduction from Jackson. Much of the action, however, will be concentrated on Tuesday and Wednesday, when members of the committee will have a chance to ask questions about her experience and judicial philosophy.
Jackson’s historic nomination, briefly explained
Biden first nominated Jackson for the Supreme Court in late February, a few weeks after Breyer announced that he’d retire.
As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, Jackson’s long been a contender for the high court and was previously interviewed for the job by former President Barack Obama as well.
If confirmed, Jackson would bring extensive experience to the position: She became a DC Circuit Court judge last summer, and served as a DC District Court judge for eight years prior to that. Before that, she was a public defender, vice chair of the US Sentencing Commission — a federal body that offers sentencing guidance for the federal judiciary — and an attorney in private practice.
Jackson has ruled on a range of cases, and joined a recent decision that Trump couldn’t block House committees from accessing documents related to the Capitol attack of January 6, 2021. As a member of the Sentencing Commission, Jackson backed reductions to penalties for drug-related offenses, and as a public defender, she represented a detainee in Guantanamo Bay as well as criminal defendants.
Jackson’s nomination marks an important milestone: Biden had previously promised he’d nominate the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court, which has only had five women Justices and two Black Justices in its over-200-year history.
After the hearing, the confirmation is set to move quickly, with Democrats aiming to hold a final Senate vote before April 8.
If confirmed, it’s not yet certain when Jackson would officially join the Court. Breyer has said that he will retire by the end of this Supreme Court term this summer.
What to expect from Democrats and Republicans
For the first time since 2016, Democrats are in the position of fielding a nominee they support.
They’ll be using the hearing to talk up her credentials, to emphasize how much bipartisan backing she has, and to stress the importance of bringing more racial and ideological diversity to the federal bench.
“Clearly, this is an extraordinarily qualified person,” Judiciary Committee member Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Vox. “Their experience on the federal bench overshadows many of the people there now.”
Republicans, meanwhile, are poised to ask about Jackson’s record on criminal justice issues including her time on the US Sentencing Commission, past work defending a Guantanamo Bay detainee, and decisions related to child sex offenders. The decision about Trump and the January 6 documents, and comments she’s made declining to reject court packing, are also expected to come up.
Multiple Republicans on the Judiciary Committee including Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Lee (R-UT), have raised particular concerns about Jackson’s work on cases involving child sex offenders. In a recent Twitter thread, Hawley emphasized a series of cases when Jackson imposed shorter sentences for people in child porn cases than the federal sentencing standards. Many of the attacks in Hawley’s thread were unfounded, and Jackson’s approach to sentencing was consistent with how bipartisan experts have approached the issue.
“I think her cases and her record deserve answers, and I’d like to get them next week,” Hawley told reporters. “I’d like to hear from her why she sentenced the way she did.”
Broadly, Jackson’s hearing gives Republicans an opportunity to hit several of their favorite talking points against Democrats. GOP lawmakers claim, however, that they’ll take a more respectful approach to the hearing than they say Democrats previously took with nominees like Brett Kavanaugh, though that remains to be seen.
Already, they’ve deemed Jackson far left because of the support she’s received from progressive organizations. They’ve emphasized, too, that her appointment adds to a larger Democratic effort to go “soft on crime.”
“President Biden is deliberately working to make the whole federal judiciary softer on crime,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a recent floor speech.
The challenge that Republicans face in this process is that the outcome is pretty much determined.
Since it will only take a simple majority vote, Democrats will be able to confirm her on their own if all 50 members of the caucus stick together and Vice President Kamala Harris serves as a tie-breaking vote. Democrats have also emphasized that Jackson has backing from several bipartisan groups as well as law enforcement organizations including the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police.
Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers confirmed Jackson to the DC Circuit Court 53-44, with Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Lindsey Graham crossing party lines to support her. Because of how politicized Supreme Court nominations have gotten, though, it’s not yet clear if any of them would back Jackson this time around. Graham, for instance, noted that the “radical Left has won” when Jackson was nominated.
Their votes aren’t needed as things stand, though, and short of any major surprises concerning Jackson, the question is whether either side’s message sticks.
“My goal is to make this a political wash instead of a political win for Democrats,” says Mike Davis, the head of a right-leaning group called The Article III Project, who’s also had informal talks with Republican committee staff.
Civil defense and other “right of boom” approaches could help mitigate the toll of a nuclear war — at least somewhat.
“Left of boom” is a military idiom adopted by US forces during the Iraq War that originally referred to efforts to disrupt insurgents before they planted improvised explosive devices (IED) that could kill American troops; in other words, before the IED went boom.
It has since grown to become an all-purpose corporate buzzword, in everything from cybersecurity to disaster planning, for actions that can be taken to anticipate and prevent a catastrophe before it happens.
There’s a (literal) flip side to this concept: “right of boom,” which covers everything that can be done to mitigate the effects and enhance resilience after disaster strikes. While “left of boom” strategies in their original meaning involved everything from better intelligence of insurgents’ movements to plotting out safer patrol routes, “right of boom” meant hardening armor, improving medical care, and even boosting psychological resilience.
If “left of boom” is meant to prevent the worst from happening, “right of boom” is meant to prevent what happens from becoming the worst.
Thinking about nuclear war has been dominated by “left of boom” concepts. Deterrence, arms control treaties, nonproliferation — they all aim to prevent that ultimate boom from ever occurring. And so far, the world has largely been successful. Since the US dropped the 21-kiloton “Fat Man” atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killing as many as 70,000 people, no nuclear weapon has been used in war, though there have been enough close calls to fill a book.
While the early days of the Cold War saw Strangelovian thinkers like RAND’s Herman Kahn theorize about “tragic but distinguishable postwar states” — galaxy brain-sized ways to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war — the idea of preparing for a nuclear war seemed increasingly ludicrous as arsenals grew to tens of thousands of warheads and studies raised the prospects of a “nuclear winter” post-conflict. When the Cold War ended and warheads were decommissioned by the thousands, the fear — and the need to take that fear seriously — wound down like the hands of the Doomsday Clock.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the tacit threat of nuclear weapons lurking in the background of any conflict between Moscow and the US and its NATO allies, has changed all that. In European countries, which sit closer to the battlefield, fear of a nuclear catastrophe has led to a rush on fallout shelters and anti-radiation potassium iodide pills.
A recent post on the Effective Altruism forum — a site that hosts posters interested in effective altruism and averting existential risks — examined a number of forecasts and put the aggregate chance of death in a nuclear explosion in London over the next month at 24 in a million, with probabilities 1.5x to 2x less in more distant San Francisco.
That’s a “low baseline risk,” as the authors put it, and the chance of nuclear weapons being used purposefully remains highly unlikely. But it’s clearly a baseline risk that has increased, and as UN Secretary General António Guterres warned this past week, “the prospect of nuclear war is now back within the realm of possibility.” As the existential risk expert Seth Baum wrote recently, it’s “a prospect worth taking extremely seriously.”
Taking that prospect seriously requires some “right of boom” thinking, to try to do what we can to mitigate the harms and improve human resilience if the worst of the worst does occur, all the while walking a careful tightrope between being alert and being alarmist.
Reinventing civil defense
The days of elementary-school fallout shelters and “Bert the Turtle” — a cartoon animal who told 1950s kids how to “duck and cover” in cartoons funded by the US Federal Civil Defense Administration — are long gone.
Funding and attention for civil defense — drills, shelters, and other programs designed to reduce the death toll from a nuclear attack — began to melt away in the latter half of the Cold War. By 1986, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was reporting to Congress that “US civil defense capabilities were low and declining,” though it still couldn’t get its $130 million ask to keep existing emergency operations centers running at a minimal state fully funded.
But while a full-scale, US-Russia nuclear war would overwhelm target cities and devastate the global climate, up-to-date civil defense can make a difference in saving lives in what might be a more likely nuclear incident, like a terrorist bomb or a missile lobbed by a rogue state. “Yes, sadly some people would die immediately and have no control,” says Kristyn Karl, a political scientist at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “But recent models show us there are many situations in which a lot of people would survive.”
The first step to making civil defense useful in the 21st century is to help people overcome what Karl calls the “fatalism and apathy” that nuclear weapons can engender, which is why she and her colleagues launched a program in 2017 called Reinventing Civil Defense. Using everything from graphic novels to posters to websites — Karl’s colleague at Stevens, Alex Wellerstein, is behind the Nukemap site that allows you to simulate a nuclear strike of any size on any location — the project aims to reawaken the public to the still-existing threat of nuclear war, and “the actionable steps,” as Karl puts it, that can be taken to potentially save their lives.
That advice can be broken down into three main points: get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.
Should you receive warning of an incoming strike or detonation, get inside the nearest standing building — ideally one that is concrete — stay there for 12 to 24 hours, the amount of time when radiation levels from fallout will be at their worst, and wait for news about where to evacuate next.
More meaningful civil defense would require federal, state, and local governments to take the nuclear threat as seriously as they do others. When I spoke to Wellerstein in 2018 for my book End Times, he noted that while active shooter drills have become common in American schools, comparatively little is done on what actions can be taken after a nuclear strike. (Comparing the two threats is difficult, but one risk expert in 2018 put the chance of a student being killed by a gun while in a public school on any given day since 1999 at 1 in 614 million.)
“These sorts of activities can cause people not only to behave in their better interest during an emergency, but also to take it more seriously,” he told me then. “You’re not going to save everybody, but there’s a difference between 500,000 dead and 800,000 dead.”
Thinking through the unthinkable
For advocates, civil defense requires toeing a careful line: acknowledging that a nuclear attack would be unimaginably horrible no matter what we do, while insisting that actions can be taken on the ground now that would make a difference right of boom without being seen as overly alarmist.
Even so, a full-scale nuclear war involving much of the world’s 15,000 remaining nuclear warheads — roughly 90 percent of which are held by the US and Russia — would likely overwhelm even the best attempts at civil defense. While such a catastrophe is less likely than it was at the height of the Cold War to extinguish human civilization, the immediate death toll would be in the tens of millions and solar dimming from countless fires would severely compromise our ability to grow food.
To deal with that scenario, groups with an effective altruist or longtermist bent have expressed interest in funding efforts to study how to produce food with little sunlight. One organization at the leading end of that effort is the Alliance to Feed the Earth in All Disasters (ALLFED), which is exploring options like insects, seaweed, algae, and other options that could serve as potential food sources in a world where solar radiation had been severely dimmed, whether because of a nuclear winter event or a less likely major asteroid impact or supervolcanic eruption.
“We would be in a much better position with a backup plan,” David Denkenberger, the founder of ALLFED, told 80,000 Hours in 2018.
But the dismal possibility of trying to make do with insects and algae underscores the hard truth that our best hope for survival in a nuclear war is in ensuring one never takes place, a fact civil defense advocates know all too well and hope their own efforts to imagine the unimaginable can aid. (To that end, the decline in philanthropic funding for “left of boom” efforts to reduce the risk of a nuclear war occurring, which Dylan Matthews wrote about this week for Vox, is a worrying development.)
“The unthinkable can happen,” Lovely Umayam, a nuclear weapons expert at the Stimson Center, told me. “The most practical thing we can do as responsible global citizens is to demand countries to take nuclear arms controls and disarmament seriously once we get out of this current crisis.”
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
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