Halifax2TheMax said:

For those wanting to look beyond the repub soundbites. Intellectually dishonest and lazy. Hey buh, buh, buh, same-same. From the NYT email blast:

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March 24, 2022

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  By David Leonhardt

Good morning. Senate Republicans are painting a false portrait of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at the confirmation hearing yesterday.Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Distorted reality

Here are a few facts about Ketanji Brown Jackson:

• She frequently associates herself with a patriotic narrative of American history. “The first of my many blessings,” she told the Senate this week, “is the fact that I was born in this great nation.”

• She is not an advocate of critical race theory or other progressive ideas about education. She has never taken a public position on hot-button school issues like whether young children should be taught about gender identity.

• As a federal judge, she has a mainstream record, broadly typical of a Democratic nominee. She has often praised law enforcement, including her proud mention this week that her brother and two of her uncles worked as police officers.

You might not know any of this — you might well believe the opposite — if you spent the past few days listening to Republican senators or consuming many conservative media sources.

Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing has turned into a case study of how disconnected from reality large parts of the Republican ecosystem have become. I know that description sounds harsh and will bother some conservative readers. But I think the facts warrant it.

Birtherism to pornography

The debate over Jackson’s nomination has often had little to do with her. It has become an argument over a nominee who does not exist — one who does not respect America, is not truly religious, coddles child abusers and terrorists and has highly developed views about the importance of “woke” education. Yesterday, conservative activists used this portrayal to pressure moderate Democratic senators to vote against Jackson.

Conspiracy theories and unfair accusations have a long history in American politics, of course. But they have often remained on the margins. Today, distortions and falsehoods have moved to the center of politics.

While neither party is entirely innocent, there is a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats. False claims regularly flow from the leaders of the Republican Party — including its most recent president, several of its likely future presidential candidates and the most influential media figures aligned with the party.

Donald Trump began his political career by claiming that Barack Obama was born in Africa and ended his presidency with false accusations of voter fraud. Prominent Republicans regularly cast doubt on the fact that greenhouse gases are warming the planet and contributing to extreme weather. Disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines has been so widespread that almost 40 percent of Republican adults have not received a shot, sometimes with fatal consequences.

There is no comparable list of false information coming from senior members of the Democratic Party.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, presenting details of Judge Jackson’s sentencing history.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

The Jackson hearings have become the latest example. Several Republican senators — including Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz yesterday — have tried to portray her as soft on child pornographers. Their argument depends on a misleading cherry-picking of facts from cases she has heard.

A useful debunking appeared this week in National Review, the conservative magazine, written by Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor who noted that he disagreed with Jackson on many legal matters. McCarthy also wrote that Hawley’s accusations were “meritless to the point of demagoguery” and “a smear.” Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has pointed out that some Trump nominees had a similar record as Jackson in child-pornography cases, and that Hawley voted to confirm them.

Woke education has become another focus of the hearings, with Republicans like Cruz and Marsha Blackburn trying to portray Jackson as an advocate for it. In truth, she has not taken a position on the issues that fall under that category. Her sole — tenuous — connection to them is serving on the board of Georgetown Day School, an elite private school in Washington.

That was apparently enough for the Republican National Committee to tweet an image of her this week, with her initials — KBJ — crossed out and replaced with CRT, an abbreviation for critical race theory. (Much of the Republican criticism of Jackson probably would have applied to any nominee, regardless of race, but it is hard to imagine the same tweet about a white judge.)

The only time Jackson appears to have mentioned critical race theory publicly was in a 2015 speech. It was part of a list of disciplines that she said had an intellectual connection to criminal sentencing, including administrative law, philosophy, psychology and statistics.

A fairer critique

To be fair, Republicans are correct that many of the broader issues are legitimate matters of public debate. And on some of them, Republicans can make a credible case that progressive Democrats are to the left of public opinion (as Thomas Edsall, a Times Opinion columnist, explains).

Most Americans oppose cutting police budgets, for instance. Many believe that allowing all transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports can be unfair to other girls. Many voters — and not just white voters — think that liberals focus too much on racial identity. Most Americans feel proud of the country and its symbols, including those that some progressives consider racist, like Thanksgiving, the Constitution, the flag and George Washington.

But in trying to make Jackson a stand-in for these views, Republican senators are distorting reality. They are creating a caricature of a liberal Democrat that bears little resemblance to Jackson herself.

“One thing that is striking about this hearing,” Lori Ringhand, a legal scholar, told The Times, “is how little effort we are seeing to engage the nominee on her views about actual legal issues.”

More on the hearings

• After hours of patiently responding to accusations, Jackson displayed some pique at Hawley’s focus on pornography and later dabbed her eyes as Senator Cory Booker praised her life story.

• A few Republican senators, including John Cornyn and Mike Lee, took a different approach, turning down the temperature to ask substantive questions.

Continue reading the main story

dankind said:

SNL should have a recurring skit called, "Ouch, My Whiteness!"

There's so much comedic gold out there that no one is mining.

And these hearings in particular have provided a plethora of pay dirt.

gimmesometruth27 said:

mitch is a no vote on her. she must not be asian enough.

this is such bullshit because they all voted for her for her current job not all that long ago. and she is very, very qualified for this position. 

mickeyrat said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

mitch is a no vote on her. she must not be asian enough.

this is such bullshit because they all voted for her for her current job not all that long ago. and she is very, very qualified for this position. 

every gop will vote no. the deciding vote will be a black asian......

gimmesometruth27 said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

mickeyrat said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

mitch is a no vote on her. she must not be asian enough.

this is such bullshit because they all voted for her for her current job not all that long ago. and she is very, very qualified for this position. 

every gop will vote no. the deciding vote will be a black asian......

I don’t trust Manchurian Joe to do the right thing. At all.

neither do i. nor do i trust sinema. she is due for a dramatic mean girl thumbs down curtsey. it's been a minute since the last one.

tbergs said:

Weird that the right isn't frothing over the Meadows/Thomas text exchanges and demanding Clarence step down? Why has this story been suppressed until now? Damn media. s/c

The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson are now over. And they were incredibly ugly.

In advance of the hearings, my colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote that Jackson’s identity as a Black woman as well as her professional background as a former public defender meant that it was likely she’d be subjected to more questions regarding her qualifications than another nominee would be. And sure enough, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee wasted little time grilling Jackson — often in ways that suggested women and people of color are less qualified than their white counterparts, or that their race makes them inherently biased against white people.

There were attacks both inside — and outside — of the hearings that tried to paint Jackson as a supporter of critical race theory, a legal framework for understanding systemic racism that the GOP has co-opted as a catch-all term for anything related to race. Her judicial record in cases involving child pornography was also heavily scrutinized, even though there is no evidence that she was uncommonly soft in her sentences.

We don’t know yet whether the hearings will dramatically alter Americans’ support of Jackson, but at this point, many Americans support her confirmation. Per a March 1-18 poll from Gallup, 58 percent of Americans said the Senate should vote to confirm Jackson, versus 30 percent who thought she should not be confirmed and 12 percent who had no opinion. Notably, that’s the second-highest level of support that Gallup has recorded for a Supreme Court nominee dating back to Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987.1 Only Chief Justice John Roberts scored higher than Jackson, and only slightly higher — 59 percent of Americans said they supported his nomination in 2005.

For weeks now, anywhere from a plurality to a majority of Americans have said that they support confirming Jackson. No polls have been conducted entirely after the start of the confirmation hearings — but nine different polls have found plurality support for Jackson’s confirmation since Jackson was announced as the nominee2 and five more have found majority support for it.3

But while Jackson has enjoyed majority support in many polls, there’s likely a ceiling to her approval since political polarization has made the process of selecting Supreme Court justices more contentious.

Support for Jackson’s nomination among Democrats has been particularly high, sometimes clocking upward 70 percent in the polls we looked at, but Republicans’ views have been much more divided. For instance, Morning Consult/Politico found in late February that 25 percent of Republicans thought that the Senate should confirm Jackson, while 30 percent opposed her nomination. But across three subsequent polls in March, support was lower among Republicans and opposition was higher, hovering in the mid-to-high 30s. Polls from The Economist/YouGov, dating from Feb. 26-March 1 and March 19-22, found a similar trend — but with greater levels of opposition among Republicans. In the earlier poll, 45 percent opposed confirming Jackson, but this figure grew to 52 percent in the later poll. 

Recent Supreme Court nominees haven’t received the same level of support they once did from Congress, either. Of the seven justices confirmed since Stephen Breyer, only Roberts has received more than 69 percent of the Senate voting in favor of confirmation. He is also the only justice among those seven to have earned the backing of a majority of the other party’s senators.

Three Republican senators backed Jackson’s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year, but as evidenced by the tenor of this week’s hearings, there’s little chance Jackson garners more — or even the same level of — Republican support this time around.

If confirmed, Jackson would be the first Black female Supreme Court justice, and as such, many Americans think her nomination is historic. A March 7-13 poll from the Pew Research Center found that 66 percent of Americans thought Jackson’s nomination was at least somewhat important. And a March 10-14 poll from Monmouth University found that 53 percent of Americans approved of Biden prioritizing the nomination of a Black woman. But one Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from Feb. 18-21, which predates Biden’s nomination of Jackson, found lower levels of support for his promise to appoint a Black woman. Fifty-two percent of Americans said it was at least somewhat important to them that a Black woman become a Supreme Court justice, while 48 percent said it was not very or not at all important to them.

For Black Americans, Jackson’s nomination has been especially important. For instance, that Pew survey found that 90 percent of Black adults said having a Black woman on the Supreme Court would be at least somewhat important to them, compared with 66 percent of adults overall. And even though the AP/NORC poll found that a smaller share of Americans thought it was important a Black woman be nominated to the court, 85 percent of Black Americans said in that poll that it was at least somewhat important to them. But as my colleague Alex Samuels wrote earlier this week, this is likely not enough to substantially improve Black voter turnout or Democrats’ prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.

With the hearings now over, we now wait for Jackson’s confirmation vote. Given that the Senate almost surely won’t vote within the next week, there’s still plenty of time for public opinion to change around Jackson, especially as clips from the hearings make the rounds on social media and television. At this point, though, Jackson still benefits from having the support of many Americans, and opposition to her nomination doesn’t seem to exceed typical partisan divides. With a Democratic-controlled Senate, that might be all that’s needed for her ascension to the nation’s highest court.