How does Jackson stand after questioning? Democrats confident despite GOP criticism
Senators have covered a broad range of topics as they consider the Floridian poised to be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, but over and over again the conversation has returned to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sentencing decisions in seven child pornography cases from her nine years on the federal bench.
The topic had received no public mention from lawmakers with regard to Jackson until last week when Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, attacked the judge’s record in sex offenses cases in a lengthy Twitter thread.
By Wednesday the Senate Judiciary Committee was locked in a bitter and sometimes repetitive debate over whether Jackson’s sentences were overly lenient or standard for federal judges as the topic emerged as one of the dominant themes of the marathon hearings.
Hawley pressed Jackson Wednesday afternoon on whether she regretted sentencing an 18-year-old offender to three months in prison in a 2013 child pornography case in which the guidelines would have recommended up to 10 years.
“What I regret is that in my hearing about my qualifications to be a justice on the Supreme Court, we have spent a lot of time focusing on this small subset of my cases,” Jackson responded.
Later in the hearing, Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, questioned why Jackson’s sentences in these cases did not come up last year when she was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit with bipartisan support.
“Did they not do their homework? Were they lax? Did they make a mistake?” Booker questioned. “I wonder — as they asked you the question, ‘do you regret’ — I wonder if they regret that.”
Booker, the only Black lawmaker on the committee, called Jackson a “harbinger of hope,” recounting how he was stopped on a run outside his Washington, D.C., home by a Black woman who was inspired by Jackson’s hearings.
Jackson, for the first time in more than 21 hours of questioning, pulled a tissue out to wipe her eyes as Booker continued about how she had earned this spot, and how hard she worked to earn it.
“I’m not letting anybody in the Senate steal my joy!” he exclaimed during his speech. “I just look at you, and I start getting full of emotion.”
Jackson remained silent through the end of Booker’s speech, at times wiping her eyes, taking in the moment as he compared her to other trailblazing Black women from Harriet Tubman to Venus Williams, Beyoncé and astronaut Mae Jemison.
Can Jackson win swing vote senators?
Democrats said the GOP attacks on her handling of sex offense cases had fallen flat, pointing to statistics that show the bulk of federal judges had handed down similar sentences, including Republican-appointed ones supported by members on the committee. But they acknowledged the line of questioning had changed the tenor of the hearing on President Joe Biden’s historic nominee to the high court.
“It was discredited from the start. Every major news organization that has taken a look at his charges have said there’s no basis for it,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, the Judiciary chairman and No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, told reporters Wednesday. “Unfortunately it has set a tone which was much different than I expected and that I hoped for.”
Jackson, a former vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, enjoyed unanimous support when she was confirmed as a federal district court judge in 2013 and she received the backing of three Republicans when she was elevated last year to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, largely seen as a springboard to the Supreme Court.
Her contentious exchanges Tuesday and Wednesday with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, one of the Republicans who supported her for the D.C. Circuit, cast doubt on whether Jackson can achieve the same level of bipartisan support she has enjoyed in the past.
Graham told the Herald Tuesday that the Supreme Court was a “completely different game” from the D.C. Circuit, pointing to its role in crafting precedent.
But his questions over two days focused little on precedent as he grilled Jackson over her work on Guantánamo Bay cases as an attorney in the 2000s and on her criminal sentencing as a federal trial court judge, both of which would have been part of her record when he voted for her less than a year ago.
Graham joined Hawley and other Republicans in scrutinizing Jackson’s decision to hand down sentences in seven child pornography cases that were below federal guidelines.
She defended her decisions, noting that she had sent all of the perpetrators in question to federal prison and included long-term monitoring of their computer usage as part of their sentence. “That’s what Congress has required of judges and that’s what I did in every case,” Jackson said.
Graham rejected this explanation as unsatisfactory.
“Do you think it is a bigger deterrent to take somebody who’s on a computer looking at sexual images of children in the most disgusting way is to supervise their computer habits versus putting them in jail?” Graham asked Jackson Wednesday. “...Put their ass in jail.”
Democrats have repeatedly pointed to statistics that show only 30% of offenders in non-production child pornography cases receive sentences within the guidelines. Durbin said that Jackson’s rulings are not an outlier and blamed Congress for failing to update the guidelines to reflect technological changes.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, said the argument that other federal judges have issued similar sentences isn’t persuasive.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right. Maybe all the federal judges are wrong if they’re as soft as she is on sex crime offenders,” Marshall, a freshman senator, told the Herald.
Democrats are not worried that the attack has damaged Jackson’s path to the high court, but they acknowledged that it could be tougher to win over Republicans.
“If we were in an environment where we’re just totally looking at one’s qualifications, experiences, the breadth of those experiences, then I would think that she would have pretty much unanimous support. We’re not in that kind of environment,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, a member of the Judiciary Committee. “I’m just hoping that there will be some Republicans who will have an open mind.”
Jackson needs 51 votes for confirmation, which Democrats can achieve either with Vice President Kamala Harris’ deciding vote or by persuading just one Republican to cross the aisle as long as Biden’s party remains united behind his nominee.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a Republican who backed Jackson last year, told the Herald Tuesday evening that she had seen little of the hearings as she’s been focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Collins had said last week that she would wait for the hearings to conclude before deciding how to vote on Jackson’s nomination. She repeated that line to reporters again Wednesday.
Rubio, Scott discuss potential first Floridian on the court
It’s unclear whether the attack will resonate with the broader public. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that 58% of respondents supported her confirmation compared to just 30% opposed. The number in favor is among the highest for Supreme Court nominees in the last 35 years.
But that’s based on a survey conducted March 1 through March 18. Hawley’s Twitter thread came at the tail-end of that time frame and the hearings did not begin until after it concluded.
The White House has accused Hawley of trying to signal to QAnon, the conspiracy movement that believes former President Donald Trump is at war with a secret cabal of pedophiles, through his line of questioning. Supporters of the fringe movement were part of the mob that attacked the Capitol last year on Jan. 6.
Hawley, widely seen as a presidential aspirant in 2024, dismissed the alleged connection between his questions and the conspiracy movement Wednesday.
“I just think it’s interesting that for this White House if you want to talk about crime or you want to talk about the threats to children, you’re dismissed as a conspiracy theorist,” Hawley said.
Jackson would be the first Floridian on the court, but she is unlikely to receive support from either of her home state senators.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida., said that Republican senators had been respectful during the hearing. He called Jackson a nice person, but he panned her as an activist judge. Scott shares a consulting team with Hawley.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida., who shares Jackson’s Miami roots, said he had only seen snippets of the hearing, but he said the questions about Jackson’s sentencing in sex offense cases as a federal trial court judge were a legitimate part of the vetting process.
“This is the Supreme Court and this is for the rest of her life. She’s 51 years old. She can be there 30-40 years and become a key member of that court for decades. So I think those are fair questions to examine someone’s records,” said Rubio, who was one of three Republicans who did not participate in last year’s D.C. Circuit vote.
The Kansas City Star’s Daniel Desrochers contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 23, 2022 at 2:08 PM with the headline "How does Jackson stand after questioning? Democrats confident despite GOP criticism."
