Last week, history was made when Ketanji Brown Jackson was the first-ever Black woman and former public defender confirmed as a Justice on the Supreme Court by the U.S. Senate.
There were cheers and applause in the Senate when the vote was complete.
But not alas from the complete Senate.
With grim stone faced visages, several Republicans exited the Senate in protest.
Never mind that most of those Senators had voted in favor of previous confirmations for Judge Jackson to other appointments within the judicial system.
Republicans tried to label Jackson as soft on child porn and child sex offenders, citing "lenient" sentencing for child sex offenders. Her record as a judge for sentencing in pretty much within the mainstream for judges and is not particularly lenient or otherwise. Also Republicans getting all riled up over child sex offenders is the height of hypocrisy when Ruben Verastigui is among their number. Verastigui, a GOP staffer, was recently sentenced to 151 months in prison for child porn that includes (oh this makes me sick!) babies!
Jackson was mocked by Republicans for her declining to define a “woman” during her confirmation hearing, an attempt to bait her into a contentious debate about transgender people which has jack shit to do with her qualifications as a judge. By the way, Republicans were a spectacle of mixed messaging in their own efforts to define what is a "woman". The best one dude could come up with is that woman do not have (and I quote) "a tallywhacker".
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) falsely claimed that Jackson likes to help terrorists, and said she would have defended Nazis at Nuremberg. This was a dig at Jackson’s stint as a public defender representing Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of terrorism. As a public defender, Jackson did not pick her clients.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), this blog's still remaining champion "LYING FUCK BASTARD", made a big show of badgering Jackson if thinks “babies are racist,” waving an anti-racism children’s book in the air, trying to connect Jackson to "critical race theory".
(Cruz's efforts wound up making that children's book ended a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon. So "Boo yah! You LYING FUCK BASTARD!")
None of this was unexpected.
As I wrote on Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings are underway in the US Senate and as potentially the first black woman to be seated on the Supreme Court, she should expect to catch shit from a bunch of white men.
And that bunch of white men stepped up big time with an onslaught of misguided inquiries guided by distortions of her record or outright lies or topics that were not relevant to the candidate before them but made for good headline copy for the white racists back home.
But Ketanji Brown Jackson met the onslaught with a commendable grace under pressure and will now provide a welcome perspective on the lives of Americans on the Supreme Court bench that has been lacking for centuries.
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