Analysis: GOP questions reveal the bad-faith scrutiny reserved for Black nominees
Some Republicans, lacking a coherent strategy, are pressing Jackson for her views on The 1619 Project and the children’s book “Antiracist Baby” (because “critical race theory”), though neither has anything to do with the job she’s being considered for. Others are trying with great effort to cast the nominee as weak on crime by distorting her past work defending Guantanamo Bay detainees and her sentencing in child pornography cases.
This wafer-thin opposition is revealing.
The 1619 Project and CRT
Some Republicans on Tuesday seemed determined to deflect from Jackson’s record.
Take Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance. He spent several minutes of his questioning time not talking about Jackson but instead impugning Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine writer and the creator of The 1619 Project, which has become a lightning rod for the anger of the political right. Then, he leaped to CRT and rifled through children’s books that he said espouse the law school framework.
“Do you agree with this book (‘Antiracist Baby’) that is being taught to kids that babies are racist?” Cruz asked, without any detectable irony.
“Senator, I have not reviewed any of those books, any of those ideas,” she said. “They don’t come up in my work as a judge, which I’m respectfully here to address.”
Later, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn revisited CRT, saying that Jackson ought to give parents the right to prohibit the concept from being taught in public school classrooms.
“It is important to them to have a Supreme Court that is going to protect parental rights to teach these children as parents see fit to have their children taught,” Blackburn said.
In important ways, avoiding conversations about anything relevant to Jackson seemed to be the point on Tuesday.
For weeks, Republicans have seemed uninterested in engaging with Jackson’s record. Presumably, that’s because they know that their attacks hold no merit and that there’s little they can do to thwart her from being confirmed. So, they’re using the hearings to prepare for something much less settled: the midterm election cycle.
‘Soft on crime’
When they weren’t preoccupied with Democrats’ treatment of Brett Kavanaugh — who four years ago was accused of sexual assault before he was confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the country’s highest court — Republicans on Tuesday were obsessed with trying to portray Jackson as “soft on crime.”
For instance, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Texas Sen. John Cornyn expressed concerns over the nominee’s advocacy for Guantanamo Bay detainees while she served as a federal public defender and worked at a private law firm. Graham went so far as to claim that Jackson’s advocacy jeopardized national security.
“I’m suggesting the system has failed miserably and advocates to change the system like she was advocating would destroy our ability to protect our country,” Graham said, before theatrically leaving the room.
Yet what such criticism downplayed was the fact that Jackson was merely following the Constitution that Republicans enjoy showering with pious praise.
“She was meeting a minimal constitutional requirement: providing defense to those who are in the criminal justice system and who are unable to afford defense,” Melissa Murray, a professor at New York University School of Law, told CNN. “To me, that suggests fidelity to the rule of law, not necessarily soft on crime.”
Alicia Bannon, the director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice, underscored the importance of Jackson’s unique professional background.
“Jackson would be the first justice, ever, to have experience as a public defender,” Bannon told CNN. “She’d be the first justice since Thurgood Marshall, who left the court more than 30 years ago, to have substantial experience representing poor criminal defendants. And that’s a critical perspective that’s long been absent from the judiciary overall and especially from the US Supreme Court.”
Notably, Marshall faced similarly dishonest scrutiny during his confirmation hearings in 1967, when a group of Southern senators tried to attach the civil rights leader to fears about crime during a season of racial unrest.
Republicans, including Cruz and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, also sought to misrepresent Jackson’s record by charging that, as a jurist, she was too lenient in child pornography cases.
“The judge is looking at all of these different factors and making a determination in every case, based on a number of different considerations,” Jackson said. “And in every case, I did my duty to hold the defendants accountable in light of the evidence and the information that was presented to me.”
Cruz and Hawley’s actions were particularly disturbing for their potential to energize the conservative fringes.
