THE HEARING OF JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON:  PART II

 

                                     …Ted Cruz was the ass he usually is at the judge’s hearing

 

So far, the Republicans have been unable to get to Judge Jackson’s demeanor

 

The Republicans tried very hard to label Judge Jackson as a major liberal.

“Do the First Amendment free speech protections apply equally to conservative and liberal protesters?” Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) asked her. (Yes, Jackson answered.)

“Do you believe the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right?” he asked next. (The Supreme Court has established that right, she said.)

What about court-packing, Republicans wanted to know? (She said that’s not her call to make, noting conservative Justice, Amy Coney Barrett gave a similar answer at her confirmation hearing.)

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) tried to press her on her thoughts about the Supreme Court creating a right to same-sex marriage. (In the time-honored tradition of nominees dodging sharing their views, Jackson said these issues could yet, come before the court.)

Does the United States need more or fewer police? Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) repeatedly pressed her. (Jackson said, “that’s not in her lane.”)

“Do you agree that our schools should teach children that they can choose their gender?” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked. (“I’m not making comments about what schools can teach,” Jackson replied.)

Jackson has been a favorite of liberal advocacy organizations. “So many of these left-wing radical groups that would destroy the law as we know it declared war on [potential Supreme Court pick] Michelle Childs and supported you,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said.

Jackson responded to many of these attacks by urging senators to look at her lengthy record, including nine years as a judge.

“I don’t think anyone can look at my record and say it is pointing in one direction or another, that it is supporting one viewpoint or another,” she said.

If confirmed, Jackson won’t be on the court when it decides possibly its most monumental abortion case in decades: whether a 15-week ban in Mississippi can stay on the books.

But if the court doesn’t knock down Roe v. Wade entirely, red states are expected to continue to challenge abortion protections, bringing the issue before the court again. Jackson, like all nominees these days, tried to avoid sharing her personal opinions on abortion.  But under questioning from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), she made it pretty clear that she thinks the Supreme Court should keep Roe. “Roe and Casey are the settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate [a] woman’s pregnancy,” she said, referencing another landmark case protecting access to abortion. (Two skeptics of abortion protections now on the court, Trump nominees Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh, said something similar in their confirmation hearings.  But they are expected to go after Roe, now that the conservatives have a strong hold on the court)

Later, during questioning from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Jackson broadly said that legal precedent should only be overturned in extreme circumstances. “When the court is asked to revisit a precedent,” she said, “its criteria, what it looks at, are whether the precedent is wrong and in fact egregiously wrong.”

Republicans also tried drawing Jackson into a debate on race

There’s no there-there to the child-porn sentencing claims, so they were pretty easy for Jackson to knock down in her personal language: “These are the cases that wake you up at night because you’re seeing the worst of humanity,” she said.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tried another angle.  Portraying her as supportive of “critical race theory”, an academic theory about how racism is perpetuated in society that has become a code phrase on the right for any teachings about race.

Meanwhile, during the hearing, the Republican Party tweeted a picture of Jackson alongside the letters “CRT.”

Jackson used direct language to distance herself from all of that. “They don’t come up in my work as a judge, which I’m respectfully here to address,” she said, when Cruz quoted from books by activists in this realm.

Later, under questioning from Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.), she emphasized that she’s never used “critical race theory” to determine a case.

Hopefully, all the GOP’s efforts to discourage the approval of Judge Jackson heading to the Supreme Court will be for not.

Copyright G. Ater 2022