New Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation is indeed historic and wonderful in many ways. But just as significant an element of today's news, I think, is that we can finally breathe easy that we have outlasted the blind, callous selfishness of ex-Justice Stephen Breyer, who held onto his seat for nearly a decade after he had any moral claim to do so.
If the decisions that the U.S. Supreme Court issues have vast consequences on innocent humans' lives—and boy, do they ever—then the need for the seats on that Court to be occupied by people who believe in protecting human rights against attempts to denude and destroy them carries vastly greater moral weight than the personal career interests of individual Justices. As a result, Breyer's decision not to retire from the Court in or before 2014—a year in which he turned 76 years old and the last year before 2021 in which Democrats held both the White House and the U.S. Senate—was simply inexcusable. Breyer then compounded his incredible selfishness by not retiring in 2021, either, even though he was 83 (!) and Democrats held the slimmest of all possible margins in the Senate; if Breyer and a single Democratic Senator from a red state (or even a blue one in which Republicans happen to control the means of Senate succession) had died or become incapacitated between January 2021 and today, Justice Jackson would have been blockaded, and Breyer's seat would remain vacant until it, very likely, was filled by a right-wing Republican appointee.
That kind of behavior is simply not morally acceptable, and we should consider Breyer disgraced by it—notwithstanding the fact that we had the extraordinary luck to survive his choices.
I think it's a horrendous failing of far too many of us on the left that we don't consider retention of U.S. Supreme Court seats as one of the most morally urgent matters in the entire world.