What are the qualifications one needs to serve as a
Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States?
The constitution does not specify any educational
standard, or really, much else. The method of
selection, as I’m sure you probably know by this
point, is that the sitting president will nominate
someone he (or in the future, she?) thinks is qualified
when there is vacancy. It is then up to the members of
the senate to determine their standards of
qualification, and vote accordingly. A simple majority
in that vote will confirm the president’s nomination.
Why are we talking about this here? Recently, President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson who has been serving as a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. John Kennedy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, asked her a simple question, “When does life begin, in your opinion?” Her reply? “Senator, I don’t know.” Kennedy pressed and asked when the law would recognize and protect life, to which she again replied, “I don’t know.” Regardless of which side of the pro-choice/pro-life divide you’re on (all reading this I hope are pro-life), this (among other questions she couldn’t adequately answer) seems like necessary knowledge to qualify her to sit in judgement of such matters. Obviously, prayers over this process, and for her rejection, are needed.
News this past week of Justice Clarence Thomas’
hospitalization can be a bit worrisome for those of us
who value, well, justice. While the court should not be
a place that has much occasion for various political
shenanigans to surface, nevertheless the fact is that
the liberal and conservative leaning of judges has a
lot of bearing on how one sees justice and how the
laws of the land will be interpreted. For various
reasons far too long to go into in such a short format
newsletter, politically conservative judges tend to
better match Christian ideals. At the moment, the
Supreme court has six judges considered to be on the
conservative side of the spectrum (and three of which
are more obviously so than the other three), and three
quite liberal judges. Thomas, being a pretty obviously
conservative judge, is one we hope to hold on to
during a liberal presidency. While worry is never
appropriate because God is always on His throne,
praying for Thomas’ healing is quite appropriate, and
it is so for multiple reasons. For our purposes here, we
pray for God to sustain the life of Justice Thomas so
that we can continue to see God work through him
and the other conservative judges for causes and
values we believe to be consistent with a biblical view
of the law and the world. So do be praying for God to
sustain him through this time of illness.