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- A retired federal judge asked President Joe Biden to not consider Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for SCOTUS.
- In a letter obtained by NBC News, Judge U.W. Clemon questioned Jackson’s commitment to workplace justice.
- Clemon pointed to a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 5,500 Black Lockheed Martin employees.
The first Black federal judge in Alabama sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to pass over a leading contender for the US Supreme Court, NBC News reported on Friday.
U.W. Clemon — a former state lawmaker who served as a federal judge in Alabama from 1980 to 2009 — petitioned the president not to consider Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the vacancy that will be filled upon the departure of Justice Stephen Breyer later this year. Jackson, who has been a frontrunner for the seat, currently sits on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.
In his letter, Clemon said that there were “several exceptionally well-qualified black female aspirants for the Supreme Court,” but expressed a desire to see Jackson out of contention for the nomination.
The retired judge pointed to the case Ross v. Lockheed, a 2016 class-action lawsuit brought forward on behalf of 5,500 Black Lockheed Martin employees, as the basis for his opposition to Jackson’s potential nomination.
Jackson presided over the case, and Clemon said in the letter that the judge failed to greenlight the settlement that was reached, which was set to disperse $22 million to the employees.
“She refused to approve the settlement because in her view there were no common factual questions,” Clemon wrote.
He continued: “Judge Jackson gave the axe to a settlement designed to benefit black workers at one of the nation’s largest employers, denied the injunctive relief agreed to by Lockheed Martin that would have addressed a root cause of systemic racial bias that could have been a model for a nation hungry for racial equity solutions; denied the black workers the right to seek evidence to prove their claim of company-wide racial discrimination, and knowingly frustrated the rights of black workers to appeal her decision.”
Clemon provided an additional warning intended to buttress his opinion of Jackson’s potential influence on the court.
“Each of these considerations, standing alone, is a bell sounding the alarm that if Judge Jackson is appointed to the Supreme Court, simple justice and equality in the workplace will be sacrificed,” he wrote.
The White House in a statement pushed back against the characterization of Jackson in the letter.
“It’s because of Judge Jackson’s experience in roles at all levels of the justice system, her character, and her legal brilliance that President Biden nominated her to the D.C. Circuit Court, after which she earned her third Senate confirmation, and he’s very proud of that decision,” deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement to NBC News.
When Breyer announced last month that he would step down from the Supreme Court at the end of the current term after 28 years on the bench, Biden reaffirmed his 2020 campaign pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the body.
Some of the other leading candidates to replace Breyer reportedly include California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, US District Judges J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina, and Leslie Abrams Gardner of Georgia.
The president has previously said that he would name his pick by the end of February.
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