Little Room for Rationality in Attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Record
The Supreme Court nomination hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson should have gone down as easily as ice cream on a hot summer day.
That was before a cloud of culture-war politics darkened the process with what President Joe Biden’s White House correctly labeled an “embarrassing QAnon-signaling smear.”
That spot-on assessment came after conservative Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, passionately leveled a misleading line of attacks under the cloak of seemingly legitimate concerns about pedophilia.
Hawley smacked back with, “If they want to dismiss parents’ concerns about their safety and they want to dismiss concerns about crime as a conspiracy theory, take that argument to the polls.”
With that, I say, Hawley dismissed concerns about justice, fairness and facts.
He wasn’t alone. Conservative Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee kept fact-checkers super-busy during the confirmation hearings for Jackson with similarly bizarre lines of questioning.
Hawley led the charge. Days before the hearings, Hawley previewed his questioning with a long Twitter thread in which he painted Jackson, a federal judge, as too sympathetic to defendants and zeroed in on the small number of child pornography cases she presided over.
Of course, as Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, the committee chairman, pointed out in dismissing Hawley’s allegations, “It should be noticed as well that the cases which the senator from Missouri referred to yesterday all resulted in incarceration of some magnitude.”
But that wasn’t good enough for Hawley. From his list of about a dozen cases, he zeroed in on the case of Wesley Hawkins, who was sentenced to three months in prison, even though government prosecutors sought two years and the probation office recommended 18 months.
Hawley detailed how the 18-year-old defendant uploaded “five video files of child pornography” to YouTube and had 17 videos of child porn on his laptop, as well as images of child porn.
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