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:
