Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson effectively responded to Republican critics in an often contentious confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
Facing Republican senators’ sometimes irrelevant or inappropriate questions, Jackson forcefully defended her record as a federal judge and declared she will rule “from a position of neutrality” if confirmed as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Jackson responded to Republicans who have questioned whether she is too liberal in her judicial philosophy, saying she tries to “understand what the people who created this law intended.” She said she relies on the words of statutes but also looks to history and practice when the meaning may not be clear.
She pushed back strongly against the ridiculous suggestions that she has given light sentences to child pornographers.
Could her rulings have endangered children? “As a mother and a judge,” she said, “nothing could be further from the truth.”
She described looking into the eyes of defendants and emphasizing the lifelong effects on victims. She said it is “important to me to represent that the children’s voices are represented.”
Democrats who control the Senate by a slim margin hope to wrap up Jackson’s confirmation before Easter.
Republican senators used their questioning in an attempt to brand Jackson — and Democrats in general — as soft on crime, an emerging theme in GOP midterm election campaigns.
Jackson effectively rebutted Republican criticism of her record on criminal matters as a judge, a federal public defender and a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency created by Congress to reduce disparity in federal prison sentences.
However, Republican criticism of her being “anti-law enforcement” and “soft on crime,” does not make sense in light of her strong support from national police organizations.
Jackson told the committee that her brother and two uncles served as police officers, and “crime and the effect on the community, and the need for law enforcement — those are not abstract concepts or political slogans to me.”
She also defended work as a public defender and later in private practice representing four Guantanamo Bay detainees. While some Republicans have complained that Jackson was defending terrorists, she noted that defenders don’t pick their clients and are “standing up for the constitutional value of representation.” Jackson said she continued to represent one client in private practice because her firm happened to be assigned his case.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn falsely asked why she would have called former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former President George W. Bush “war criminals” in a legal filing. “It seems so out of character for you,” Cornyn said.
She never referred to anyone as a war criminal, but she did argue that torture amounted to a war crime under the law and that the federal government, including Bush and Rumsfeld, was ultimately responsible.
Some of the Republican senators attempted to use the confirmation hearing to settle political scores. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham voted for her confirmation as an appeals court judge last year but has openly expressed his frustration after President Joe Biden picked her over a South Carolina judge. Graham asked her about her religion, and how often she goes to church, in angry comments about what he said was unfair criticism of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholicism ahead of her 2020 confirmation.
Jackson — who thanked God in her opening statement and said that her faith “sustains me at this moment” — responded that she is a Protestant. But she said she is reluctant to talk about her faith in detail because “I want to be mindful of the need for the public to have confidence in my ability to separate out my personal views.”
Republicans such as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted Cruz of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas appeared to use the confirmation hearing to position themselves as potential 2024 presidential candidates.
Biden chose Jackson in February, fulfilling a campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court for the first time in American history. She would take the seat of Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced in January that he would retire after 28 years on the court.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., spoke emotionally about the “joy” he felt about her historic nomination. Jackson would be the third Black justice, after Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and the sixth woman.
Booker, who is Black, said the white men who have sat on the Supreme Court for two centuries were “extraordinary patriots who helped shape this country” but that many people could have never dreamed of sitting on the court.
Jackson, who grew up in Miami, noted that she did not have to attend racially segregated public schools like her own parents did, “and the fact that we had come that far was to me a testament to the hope and the promise of this country, the greatness of America that in one generation we could go from racially segregated schools in Florida to have me sitting here as the first Floridian ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Jackson would not only be the first Black woman but also the first public defender on the court, and first with experience representing indigent criminal defendants since Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said that to be first, “often, you have to be the best, in some ways the bravest.”
Jackson has the temperament, intellect and legal experience to be on the U.S. Supreme Court. She deserves confirmation.
Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune
About Post Author
