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.
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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pointed out on Twitter, every Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded Kavanaugh’s nomination be withdrawn, in part because of the outrageous allegations of drugging women at parties that were allowed to be made against Kavanaugh by Julie Swetnick and her lawyer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.
The bottom line is either black women are inferior and incapable of learning, or the statement about not being able to define a women and other similar dodge ball game makes her unfit to take the job.
She with her prejudiced rulings about criminals, and comments backing the worst of Obama decisions before she was put up of nomination is crushing.
The people defending her has a strange view of the world.
The people nominating and defending her really do have a warped view of the world. You have that part exactly correct.
The people nominating and defending her really do have a warped view of the world. You have that part exactly correct.
Anyone who watched the Jackson hearings got a lesson into the failures of affirmative action, where you just pick someone based on everything but qualifications. The Democrats will confirm her along with a few spineless Republicans. A society doesn’t become sick overnight, but this is one example of many as to why the United States of America is firmly going into the toilet. As someone posted or said, if Jackson can’t define a what a woman is, how could she ever define what the Constitution is.
If she gets in…America is burnt toast!!
Washington postpile?..
About time to delete this site!
Prospective Justice Jackson has a record that smacks of promotions based on her race and sex to fill various needs, from local courts up to the District and the Circuit Courts. She has not spent very long in any judicial position. There are excellent alternative female, black candidates who have been on the bench far longer than Jackson. She is just the candidate that the loudest voices on the extreme left have clamored to have him nominate.