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.

Significantly Hawley did not mention that Hawkins had not produced any of the videos or taken any of the pictures, but exchanged ones he had found online.

He was only involved in this for a few months, Jackson noted in her sentencing, and, other than his engagement with the undercover officer who invited him to view the images, she said to him, “there isn’t an indication that you were in any online communities to advance your collecting behavior.”

Weighing his age, relative to those Hawkins was viewing, Jackson said, “Most child pornography offenders are middle-aged adults who are deviants drawn to pictures of vulnerable children … This case is different because the children in the photos and videos you collected were not much younger than you.”

Significantly, Hawley chose the lightest sentence in his list of cases to present what Glenn Kessler, who heads up The Washington Post’s Fact Checker page, called a selective picture “that lacks significant context.”

For example, by suggesting that Jackson, a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, is out of the judicial mainstream with her sentencing of child-pornography defendants, Hawley ignored the long debate that continues to percolate in the judicial community about whether mandatory minimums are too high and leave too little to the discretion of judges.

But well outside the realm of rational debate is the surge in online hate and other chatter that followed the pedophilia testimony, as NPR reported, citing a data analysis by Pyrra Technologies, a threat-monitoring company that tracks alternative social media platforms.

While a direct link can’t be proved, the timing is telling. We’ve seen this pattern before as QAnon rose from a random conspiracy theory into an internet-fueled movement during Donald Trump’s presidential years, pushing false claims of a satanic, cannibalistic, sexually predatory cabal supposedly tied to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.

Since then, says Welton Chang, Pyrra’s CEO, it has been a “steady drumbeat of amplification of the viral clips and the sound bites that are coming out of the nomination hearing.”

Was all this fuss necessary? Hardly. Jackson’s appointment will not change the court’s current 6-3 conservative dominance, since she replaces another liberal, the retiring Stephen Breyer, for whom she used to work.

But the race to score political points and raise more campaign dollars as the midterm elections approach seems to allow rapidly shrinking space for reasonableness or rationality.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)