Responding to Republican criticism of her sentencing decisions in child pornography cases, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson has patiently explained two things her interlocutors already should have known. First, the current federal sentencing scheme for people convicted of possessing or sharing child pornography is a mess—a point that the bipartisan U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), joined by federal judges across the country, has been making for more than a decade. Second, a judge's job at sentencing is not to blindly obey federal guidelines or to rubber-stamp the prosecution's recommendation but to make an independent assessment of what penalty is just given the details of the case.
To some extent, the ignorance of Jackson's leading Republican critics is clearly feigned. Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R–Texas) are both attorneys who, like Jackson, graduated from Ivy League law schools (Yale and Harvard, respectively) and clerked for Supreme Court justices. Hawley, who has been a senator for three years, was previously Missouri's attorney general. Cruz, who has been a senator for nine years, was previously solicitor general of Texas.
