The first day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was, frankly, designed to fail. That is if the goal of the hearings is to determine whether Jackson is qualified to sit on our nation’s highest court. Monday’s session allowed the 22 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee 10 minutes each to share their hopes, dreams, fever dreams and desires about, well, anything.
For those of us who watched all, some or most of Monday’s hearings, this is a trauma that won’t soon disappear.
For those of us who watched all, some or most of Monday’s hearings, this is a trauma that won’t soon disappear. “Are these really our nation’s leaders?” we may have asked ourselves, once, twice or perhaps 300 times during the course of the day. It was a good day for those arguing to abolish the Senate, but likely not for anyone else.
Senate Republicans coalesced around a few lines of attack against Jackson. One was the tired trope that judges who view the Constitution as a living document are merely politicians in robes, one of those greatest-hits criticisms that Republicans perform at every Supreme Court justice confirmation hearing. Another criticism we heard is that Jackson is supported by a dark money campaign of left-wing liberal activists. This is an odd criticism given that conservative jurists nominated by then-President Donald Trump were supported by their own dark money organizations. Many Senate Republicans evoked the ghost of the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, although their efforts to victimize Kavanaugh and themselves may have backfired in merely reminding us of the allegation of sexual assault made against him in 2018. (Kavanaugh denies the allegation.)
But perhaps the most troubling criticism made of Jackson was not just that she is soft on crime, although this was another line of attack; it was that she is soft on a particular type of criminal: those charged with possession of child pornography. Only Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn espoused this particular line of attack. Conservative former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, who opposes Jackson’s nomination on other grounds, called this criticism “meritless to the point of demagoguery.”
The fact that Hawley’s argument has been fact-checked and discredited doesn’t take all of the sting out of the attack. It’s still hanging there in the air, like a cheap cologne that never quite dissipates, and perhaps that is the point. The more people like Hawley say “child pornography” and “Judge Jackson” in the same sentence, the more some people start to wonder, facts be damned.
The fact that Hawley’s argument has been fact-checked and discredited doesn’t take all of the sting out of the attack.
Senate Democrats, for their part, reminded us that Jackson’s nomination as the first African American woman on the Supreme Court is historic and should be celebrated. They also reminded us that she is eminently qualified, having served on both the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. And honestly, they did little more than that. If the bar was set at reading Jackson’s résumé with emotion, Senate Democrats cleared that threshold and left it at that.
That Jackson sat there, alternately smiling at Democrats or managing not to scowl at Republicans, is a testament to a type of restraint few humans possess. Let’s remember, current Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is known for being unable or unwilling to display that level of serenity; he famously shook his head and mouthed “not true” at President Barack Obama during the 2010 State of the Union address.
Monday the Senate Judiciary Committee showed that even when a Supreme Court confirmation hearing isn’t a horror show (here’s looking at the Kavanaugh hearings), it can still be a circus.
