Senator Booker asks Jackson about her ‘core values’, her ‘provocative’ statement about juggling motherhood and career
Supreme Court appointments
Senator Booker asks Jackson about her ‘core values’, her ‘provocative’ statement about juggling motherhood and career
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey questions U.S. Supreme Court nominee Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday night. Photo by Alex Brandon/Associated Press.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey turned to family matters when questioning U.S. Supreme Court nominee Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday night.
Booker noted what he called a “provocative” statement from Jackson on the first day of the hearing about how he sometimes couldn’t find the right balance between motherhood of his two daughters and his job. He asked Jackson to elaborate.
“What I said in my statement,” Jackson said, “is that I had struggled like so many working moms to juggle motherhood and a career. And it takes hard work to become a judge, to make the job of a judge, which I’ve been doing now for almost 10 years. You have a lot of cases. You don’t have a lot of resources, comparatively, and it’s often early in the morning and late at night. That means say there will be auditions at your daughters’ recitals; there will be emergencies at birthday parties that you have to deal with.
Her hope, she says, is that if her daughters see her confirmed in the Supreme Court, they will understand that “you don’t have to be a perfect mother. But if you do your best and love your children, things will be fine.
Booker also asked Jackson about the “core values” she learned from her parents.
Jackson said his parents grew up in a time when black and white children weren’t allowed to attend schools together. Still, “they persevered”, becoming the first members of their family to go to college, she said.
“They taught me to work hard,” Jackson said of his parents. “They taught me perseverance. They taught me that anything is possible in this great country.
Jackson said his parents gave him an African name “to demonstrate their pride in who they were and their pride and hope in what I could be.”
Jackson said she also learned from her grandparents, who didn’t have much of a formal education and didn’t have the same opportunities as her. But they were the hardest working people she had ever known, Jackson said.
“I think about them in the context of this historic moment,” Jackson said. “I stand on the shoulders of people of this generation.”