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The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, felling one of the most significant remaining racial barriers in American government and sending the first Democratic nominee to the high court in 12 years. Jackson, a daughter of schoolteachers who has risen steadily through America’s elite legal ranks, will become the first Black woman to sit on the court and only the eighth who is not a White man. She will replace Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer after the Supreme Court’s term ends in late June or early July. (DeBonis and Kim, 4/7)

However collegial she may be, whatever her reputation as a “consensus builder” and whether her voting record will be slightly to the right or the left of Justice Breyer’s, the court’s lopsided conservative majority will remain in charge. Judge Jackson will most likely find herself, as Justice Breyer has, in dissent in the court’s major cases on highly charged social questions. Indeed, in an institution that prizes seniority, the court’s three-member liberal wing is apt to lose power. (Liptak, 4/7)

Jackson will take her seat on the court just as it's diving headfirst into the most controversial issues in American politics — and at a moment when its conservative majority is poised to lock in victories that the right has been chasing for years, sometimes decades. Driving the news: Jackson will start hearing cases when the court's next term begins in October. And even with only about a dozen cases on the docket so far, that term is already shaping up to be a dramatic one. (Baker, 4/8)