Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Defense Background Matters Too
When Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s Republican leader from Kentucky, suggested that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson had “a special empathy for criminals,” he was not speaking as though that was a good thing.
He was speaking about the years when the federal judge and Supreme Court nominee worked as a public defender, a job in which a little empathy with one’s clients is almost part of the job description.
Yet, in the context of Senate confirmation hearings, McConnell’s allegation of an unspecified “special empathy” for suspected lawbreakers sounds like code for “soft on crime,” which is anything but a magnet for confirmation votes.
That’s why Sen. Josh Hawley, a leading right-wing Missouri Republican, even before hearings began, tweeted that Jackson was “soft” on child sex crimes.
Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, tried to neutralize that jab with a quote from a conservative National Review column that called the charge “meritless to the point of demagoguery.”
Indeed, Hawley might feel more empathy for the accused if he recalls the encouraging fist-bump he raised to Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” protesters before some of them stormed the Capitol. More than 800 have since been charged in that mob action, and many of them have defense attorneys provided by the federal government they tried to disrupt.
Did Hawley feel any empathy with them? His reelection campaign has been selling ceramic coffee mugs emblazoned with the photo of his Jan. 6 gesture and the words “Show Me Strong” for $20. Politico, which owns the photo, has since demanded that Hawley’s campaign stop the sales.
Yes, empathy often is in the eye of the beholder.
But if Hawley has learned anything from his Yale Law School years, it should be the reality that public defenders don’t get to pick their clients, whether they empathize or not.
If anything, it was a backhanded compliment to Judge Jackson’s otherwise impeccable qualifications and charmingly agreeable personality that Republican senators turned to such a futile line of attack.
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