Right-Wing Lies Against Supreme Court Nominee Must Be Met With Strong Philanthropic Response

President Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court is a historic moment. It is also an opportunity for progressive foundations to invest in the essential work of educating and engaging Americans about the importance of the courts and who sits on them.

Jackson, currently a federal appeals-court judge in Washington, D.C., will be the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice. Her nomination builds on the president’s strong commitment to addressing the underrepresentation of women of color on the federal bench. As of the end of 2021, 75 percent of President Biden’s judicial nominees were women, nearly 65 percent were people of color, and close to half were women of color.

Jackson’s nomination also reflects President Biden’s pledge to diversify the professional experience of those serving on the federal bench. Jackson will be the first Supreme Court justice since Thurgood Marshall to have done criminal–defense work.

These appointments and nominations represent clear wins for the people of our country. They are welcomed by all of us who advocate for equitable opportunity and justice for all. 

Not surprisingly, the far right is meeting this moment by waging war — and the progressive nonprofit and philanthropic world needs to be prepared to fight back.

The Judicial Crisis Network, or JCN, is at the center of a right–wing dark–money network led by Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society, with the goal of achieving ideological domination of the federal judiciary. It has raised and spent millions of dollars in pursuit of that goal.

Even before Jackson’s nomination was announced, JCN launched a $2.5 million ad campaign — one of several pre–emptive strikes against potential Biden nominees. The antigovernment and anti-Biden Club for Growth began using Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman as a political wedge issue, running Spanish-language television and digital ads in Nevada and Arizona suggesting that it amounted to discrimination against Latinas.

With the announcement last week of Jackson’s nomination, JCN has aimed its attack machine directly at her, and conservative government leaders have followed suit. On social media, the Republican National Committee denounced Jackson as “a radical, left-wing activist.” Republican officials such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell began spewing JCN’s talking points, calling Jackson “the favored choice of far-left dark-money groups.”

In the weeks ahead, we can count on a coordinated and heavily funded effort on right-wing media and social media to smear Jackson and spread distortions about her record. Foundation and nonprofit leaders must commit significant resources to advocates who are mobilizing to tell the true story of Jackson’s remarkable life and accomplishments.

We’ve seen the far right’s playbook before, so we know what’s necessary to head it off. Over the years, conservative groups have made a sport of destroying the careers of women of color serving in the federal government or seeking to serve. These include women like the late Lani Guinier, whose nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights was pulled by President Clinton following right-wing attacks. 

Lessons From the Past

Fortunately, those of us who care about the truth can look to the effective approaches taken for other recent nominees as guidance. Specifically, we can learn lessons from the experience of Vanita Gupta, the civil-rights attorney who now serves as associate attorney general but faced a grueling battle of her own to win Senate confirmation. 

Gupta’s heroic record as a civil-rights lawyer, including fighting the wrongful convictions of nearly 40 people in a small Texas town and winning their freedom, quickly came under fire last spring. JCN launched what CNN called “some of the most expensive and intense attacks” against Gupta and Kristen Clarke, a Black woman nominated to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. A piece in the New Republic described Republican senators’ attacks on Gupta and Clarke as “unhinged” and “baseless.”

 The Biden administration’s talking points emphasized support for Gupta from some law-enforcement agencies, but civil-rights leaders and nonprofit advocacy groups knew that a different strategy was needed to mobilize activists to support her nomination and energize people to stand with her once she was on the job. We needed to tell her story as we knew it.

Many of us came of age alongside Gupta in the civil-rights movement. We knew that the story of her courageous advocacy could inspire people. The organization I lead, People For the American Way, consulted with other nonprofit groups, including the Alliance for Justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the National Women’s Law Center, to produce a brief video telling Gupta’s story. We also created and distributed videos for Clarke and other women-of-color nominees to judicial and executive branch positions who were facing similar smear campaigns.

The videos were at the core of our Her Fight Our Fight campaign, a multipronged effort we launched a year ago to mobilize support for Biden’s women-of-color nominees and to fend off the racist and sexist attacks during their confirmation fights and beyond. In spite of the well-funded disinformation campaigns against them, all the nominees whose stories we told won Senate confirmation.

Ready to Act 

We and our ally organizations were ready to deploy this same storytelling approach when Jackson’s nomination was announced last Friday. That morning, we released a video about the importance of her nomination — one of three videos we had prepared for each of the most likely nominees — and launched a social-media campaign to mobilize support for her confirmation.

Right Wing Watch, a project of People For the American Way, is monitoring dishonest efforts to derail Jackson’s nomination — and working with ally groups to counter them through digital organizing and truth telling. All those efforts need philanthropic support to overcome the lopsided funding advantage held by organizations promoting a constitutional order that would return us to a time before the civil-rights movement, women’s rights, and LGBTQ equality.

Her Fight Our Fight is a shoestring operation financed through general operating funds and the support of a generous major donor. With the future of the Supreme Court at stake, we need much more. We need funding for research, ad buys, op-eds, earned media, deeper digital organizing, and live-streamed events to educate and engage people on the importance of elevating women of color to the highest levels of the nation’s judiciary. Advocates and allies have endeavored for years to get to this historic moment, but there’s more hard work ahead to balance the courts.

 A Supreme Court vacancy is a rare opportunity to have a conversation with the American people about the courts’ role in upholding or impeding equal justice, voting rights, and so much more. We must approach this work with the energy and focused engagement it deserves. We must work together to lift up the inspiring truth about Ketanji Brown Jackson and so many other remarkable women of color.