Murkowski and Romney to Support Jackson for Supreme Court

(Bloomberg) -- Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney said they would vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, giving added bipartisan support to President Joe Biden's first high-court pick.

“After multiple in-depth conversations with Judge Jackson and deliberative review of her record and recent hearings, I will support her historic nomination to be an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court,” Murkowski, of Alaska, said in a statement.

Romney, of Utah, called Jackson “a well-qualified jurist and person of honor” who “more than meets the standard of excellence and integrity” for a Supreme Court justice.

Their separate announcements come days after Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, also said she would support Jackson, an appellate court judge who would be the first Black woman to ever serve on the Supreme Court. The White House had sought their support to show Jackson could draw backing from both parties.

Murkowski and Collins both voted to confirm Jackson to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals last year, though Romney did not. No Democrat in the 50-50 Senate has said they will oppose Jackson's nomination to the nation's highest court.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the full Senate would vote later this week on the confirmation.

Of the three Republican backers of Jackson's confirmation, Murkowski is the only one who is up for re-election in November.

“I have assumed a level of risk” in making the decision because much of the rest of the GOP opposes Jackson, Murkowski told reporters. “It's not up to me to decide the timing of this and say, ‘Hey, Mr. President. I'd prefer if you would wait until I am no longer up for election.”

She said the judicial confirmation process had become too partisan and too personal. Murkowski said Jackson faced an “unwarranted” level of personal attacks in her Judiciary Committee hearing two weeks ago.

“We are to the point where it's almost automatic, if it is a president who is not of my party puts forth a nominee, I am somehow obligated to just barely even give consideration?” she said, adding that Democrats did the same with former President Donald Trump's picks. “This is an awful process. It's just awful.”

That partisan divide resulted in the Senate Judiciary Committee splitting 11-11 on sending Jackson's nomination to the floor. That required a separate vote of the full Senate Monday. Murkowski, Romney and Collins were the only Republicans to vote to discharge the nomination from the committee.

Jackson, a 51-year-old appellate court judge who also served on the U.S. District Court and as a federal public defender, last month at her confirmation hearings fended off an orchestrated barrage of Republican attacks on her record on crime and hours of probing of her views on volatile issues such as abortion.