Going into this week's Senate confirmation hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson for a Supreme Court seat, one might have assumed that the GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee would act, well, poorly. Josh Hawley, for one, had telegraphed as soon as March 16th that he would seek to portray the candidate as "soft" on criminals. This seemed to largely stem from the fact that Jackson was once a public defender, a role that is a linchpin of our adversarial justice system. What was increasingly clear once Ketanji Brown Jackson sat down for her official confirmation hearing, however, was that a gang of wing-nut senators (Hawley included) would seek to devolve the proceedings into an abject and pusillanimous circus. Here is a grim round-up of some of their quite unbelievable--and frequently bigoted--buffoonery:
Marsha Blackburn
Blackburn, the senior senator from Tennessee, decided that instead of exploring the nuances of law, she'd rather make a few red-meat sops to her base by pursuing the "culture-war" path (i.e. rank transphobia).
On Tuesday, she went out of her way to ask Jackson the now infamously irrelevant question: "Can you provide a definition of the word 'woman'?"
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Jackson's sensible retort was that she wasn't a biologist, which unfortunately led to Blackburn rambling further about transgender competitors in college sports as well as a disquisition about the vaporous evils of progressive education. She also went on a bizarre screed about a brief Jackson co-authored at a private law firm twenty years ago, wherein pro-life protestors in a "buffer zone" outside of Massachusetts abortion clinic were described as "hostile" and "noisy." Blackburn wanted to know if Jackson would describe her that way if, say, they ran into each other at church. Jackson noted she wouldn't, although it would not necessarily be an off-base judgment.
Ted Cruz
"Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?" was his big moment to rail on critical race theory, but it seemed as though what people (on the other side of the aisle, at least) could agree on was that Cruz was losing his mind. The stated impetus of this line of questioning was that Jackson serves on the board of Georgetown Day School in Washington D.C., a school that includes the book on its curriculum. Cruz seemed to forget, conveniently or otherwise, that his own children attend a school with a similar mission.
This, amazingly, wasn't all. He also took the time to dismiss Christine Blasey Ford's credible accusations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh as simply the result of Kavanaugh's supposedly excusable "teenage dating habits"--and made a head-scratching digression about whether it would be possible for him "to identify as an Asian man." This ostensibly had to do with affirmative action, somehow?
Josh Hawley
Missouri Republican Josh Hawley's assertion that Jackson was "soft" on sex offenders started early, where he took to Twitter to preview his line of attack (never mind that Jackson was quick to note that she had, indeed, sent sex offenders to prison). His quick-to-collapse reasoning behind such claims were partly related to Jackson's time on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, where she participated in a 2012 report that recommended lowering mandatory minimums for two types of child-porn offenses. But she was joined in this by Dabney Freidrich, a Trump appointee and U.S. District Court judge that received an unanimous vote on his nomination by Senate Republicans. In other words, Hawley unsurprisingly manufactured a smear and elided key details. He's also, wouldn't you know it, a hypocrite on this very issue.
Tom Cotton
Lindsey Graham
On top of this, he had plenty to say about Jackson's phantasmagoric leniency towards sex offenders; the irony of this was stunning, given his grievance-laden ranting about what he perceived as mistreatment of Brett Kavanaugh. As Amanda Marcotte wrote for Salon, Graham gave a spirited audition for "Real Housewives" by harrumphing out of the room more than once.
Mike Braun
