I went into the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson thinking that she should be confirmed — and would be, by a wider margin than most people expected. I finished the week believing that Jackson’s nomination should be rejected and that Democratic senators and President Biden had made a serious error by not taking seriously enough Jackson’s record of imposing light sentences in child pornography cases.
When I asked Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) what he had taken away from the hearings, he replied that Jackson is “a nice person, has an accomplished background, but when it comes to judging, I’ve learned several things that are incredibly unnerving.”
Chief among these — for Graham and for me — was the three-month sentence for possession of child porn that Jackson gave to Wesley Hawkins. (Jackson’s sentence also included three months of home detention and six years of supervision.) But there were other controversial sentences rendered by the judge — and all of them are facts, not made-up allegations.
“It’s not the sentence she gives in child pornography cases,” Graham told me. “They’re always on the low end, and that is disturbing. But what I learned is that this judge will not consider as a sentence enhancement the fact that the perpetrator … went on the Internet to pull down the images, and the more images the person pulls down doesn’t count in her world.”
Graham also brought to my attention this newspaper’s editorial, which compared Jackson’s hearings unfavorably to the slanderous assault in 2018 on then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. That comparison is ludicrous in part because, as conservative pundit Guy Benson pointed out on Twitter, every Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded Kavanaugh’s nomination be withdrawn, in part because of the outrageous allegations of drugging women at parties that were allowed to be made against Kavanaugh by Julie Swetnick and her lawyer Michael Avenatti, who is now in jail from an unrelated extortion case.
Whether or not one believes Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of assault on her by Kavanaugh while in high school — and I do not — the attacks on Kavanaugh came after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was the top Democrat on the committee, sat on the allegations for weeks and failed toimmediately share them with the committee, the Senate or the nominee.
No, the two sets of hearings aren’t even in the same universe.
But it’s hardly a revelation that the Kavanaugh outrage remains a scarlet wound on the reputation of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republicans want nothing to do with attacks on nominees based on alleged acts from long ago, or from high school yearbooks and the like. The battle to redefine what happened in the Kavanaugh hearings will go on, just as it still rages on about the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991.
The GOP did use the Jackson hearings to again revisit the wrongs done to Janice Rogers Brown, a Black California Supreme Court justice who was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit only after a two-year filibuster by Senate Democrats. Judicial politics are now all about memories.
That’s partly because the Judiciary Committee is the front line of the culture war. And it is partly because the left is losing ground in America. And so, it must hold on to whatever turf it has, particularly in the judiciary.
