I never thought she stood much of a chance. First of all, she made the mistake of having been nominated by a Democratic President. That’s damming info, right there. But there is also Murkowski and Collins looking wobbly as they don’t want to be seen going to bat for a child molester.
With those two gone, President Joe Manchin makes the call and you know, it is just so political and partisan to be nominating justices in this environment. Also, Biden never consulted with the GOP on this nomination. So there is that.
When she was nominated, quite a few people speculated that a lot of Republican senators would vote for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination, given that “no” votes would almost certainly be futile. The members of the GOP’s rapidly shrinking club of senatorial bipartisan fetishists could therefore indulge their particular kink at no practical cost, with the extra added benefit for them of proving how totally not racist or sexist they were by voting for a black woman.
It’s not working out that way. After two days of mainstreaming crypto-QAnon memes by claiming that Brown Jackson is soft on child porn, it’s clear that almost no Senate Republicans are going to vote for her – maybe Our Lady of the Perpetually Furrowed Brow, and Lisa Murkowski, but that’s probably it.
The breakdown of the norm that senators in the out party should vote for a SCOTUS nominee unless the nominee was some combination of tainted by political scandal (Fortas), too obviously an undistinguished partisan hack (Haynsworth and Carswell), a jurisprudential radical (Bork), or a sexual harasser (Thomas) has been quite gradual, but it’s now apparently complete.