The right reasons to oppose Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination
Truthfully, none of the issues raised against her are going to derail this nominee. That does not mean, however, there are not reasons to oppose her.
District of Columbia Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week on the question of her nomination by Joe Biden to the United States Supreme Court. (Photo: Jayne Belle/Associated Press) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
How Biden Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson is being treated by Republicans is markedly different than the unforgivable assaults on the character and integrity of now-Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who were nominated by President Donald J. Trump.
Democrats, knowing their confirmations were foregone conclusions, attempted to disrupt and derail those hearings, speaking out of order and without recognition from the Snate Judiciary Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). They invited radical Fascist protestors into the hearing room to frequently interrupt proceedings by standing and shouting during the hearing, each being escorted out by Capitol Police as they did so.
The Fascist Democrats attempted to shame and humiliate Kavanaugh by raising false allegations of criminal conduct as a teenager. They tried to paint Barrett as a religious nutcase whose conservative Catholic faith would shade every single decision she would potentially make.
None of it worked.
Now, in a similar situation, the Republicans are engaged in questioning of Brown Jackson knowing her nomination is likely a foregone conclusion. In the first day of direct inquiry of the nominee, her role as a federal public defender representing terrorist clients housed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba following 9/1 came under fire by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-NC)
Graham criticized four nearly identical briefs filed on behalf of detainees at the U.S. facility on the eastern tip of Cuba claiming that executive powers of a president of the United States were not so extensive that he could order such men incarcerated, further postulating that even his ability to declare them enemy combatants should be called into question.
As Graham pointed out, had the courts accepted her brief, it may even have prevented the U.S. from responding to those who attacked the country on September 11, 2001.
Throughout his questioning, however, Graham, though at times obviously frustrated by Brown Jackson’s obfuscation and avoidance of the key issue, remained polite and cordial in trying to get the judge to explain her position and reasoning at that time.
There are several issues being raised by Republican senators that call into question the political and judicial philosophy of Ketanji Brown Jackson and therefore her qualifications to serve on the highest court in the land.
Truthfully, none of them are going to derail this nominee. That does not mean, however, there are not reasons to oppose her.
Don’t get me wrong, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has the resume of a Supreme Court justice, as senators on both sides of the political aisle have pointed out. But her qualifications should not guarantee her a spot on the bench, especially since they are littered with red flags. There are three things senators should take into consideration before voting to support Jackson’s nomination:
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has raised the issue that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson has been too lenient on sex offenders who have come before her as a trial judge. (Photo: Dan Brezier/Washington Examiner) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
First is her record on sex-offense cases, as Sen. Josh Hawley pointed out last week. In nearly a dozen child pornography cases, Jackson chose to ignore the government’s sentencing recommendations while on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and hand down lenient sentences instead.
For example, in United States v. Hawkins, the government recommended sentencing a man who had “multiple images of child porn” to up to 10 years in prison. Jackson gave him only three months in prison, Hawley said.
Past comments made by Jackson confirm this lax sentencing was not a coincidence. While on the Sentencing Commission, Jackson seemed to downplay the possession of child pornography, claiming the criminals who seek it out do so “for either the collection, or the people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community.”
In law school, Jackson questioned the justice system’s treatment of sex offenders, arguing that courts should take into consideration the “climate of fear, hatred, and revenge associated with the release of convicted sex criminals.”
To be fair, there are numerous judges at both the state and federal levels who have called into question the sentencing guidelines for sex offenders. But as your mother used to say to you, “If Johnny jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it, too?”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-NY) went to great lengths to point out the apparent opposition among federal judges to the severe penalties demanded by the Federal Sentencing Commission for such men and women who possess child pornography. They argue they are “non-producers,” meaning they are only consumers of the filth, having nothing to do with the creation of such pornography.
It makes no difference, however. If these criminal perverts were not the market for such pornography, no one would be producing it for sale to them. Perhaps it is time to reevaluate the current attitude of lawmakers, social do-gooders and others that the perpetrators are the victims.
No, the children are the victims, and most of them wind up with lifetime-long relationship issues at best, or prostitutes, drug addicts and candidates for suicide at worst. Giving the perverts leniency for being the reason the pornography exists in the first place is not the answer. Brown Jackson has given such leniency, along with a handful of other federal judges who also shouldn’t be enabling these offenders with downward departure sentencing.
Hopefully, Hawley isn’t the only senator who finds this pattern disturbing.
Second is Jackson’s admiration for critical race theory founder Derrick Bell. During a lecture to the University of Michigan Law School in 2020, Jackson cited Bell as one of her heroes and said her parents had his book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, on their coffee table while she was growing up and that she has thought about it often since then.
Radical Fascist and advocate of Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project Derrick Bell is admired by Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who called him “one of my heroes” in a lecture at the University of Michigan law school in 2020. (Dan Burning Tree/The New York TImes) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The book claims non-minority Americans force black Americans to stay at the bottom of society and speculates about a hypothetical in which the United States sells its black citizens to space aliens in exchange for gold to pay off the national debt. Bell also claimed slavery was not just “an example of what white America has done,” but a “constant reminder of what white Americans might do.”
In the same speech, Jackson also quoted the New York Times’s fraudulent and “fake history” 1619 Project.
Just last year, during a Harvard Alumni Association webinar with university President Larry Bacon, Jackson pressed Bacon on a number of topics related to the association’s commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” including how Harvard “recruits and retains talented faculty of color,” and why it halted a “Latinx Studies” graduate course.
Finally, lawmakers should not ignore the fact that Jackson was the favorite of a number of far-left dark money groups, such as Demand Justice, that proudly favor court-packing. It is a fact Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) went to great and fraudulent pains to deflect by accusing conservatives of using dark money to assure the nominations of Kavanaugh and Barrett and to oppose Brown Jackson.
In fact, most of the organizations that threw their support behind Brown Jackson’s nomination have supported adding seats to the bench for the sole purpose of eliminating the court’s conservative majority.
Brown Jackson is making it difficult for senators to find out exactly what she thinks about this plan. Her buffering response is that she does not feel comfortable responding to questions about issues that may come before the Court. That evasiveness alone should spike her nomination right away if she does not emphatically condemn Fascist Left attempts to undermine the integrity of the Court.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell revealed this weekend that Jackson refused to object to court packing when she met with him earlier this month. He said he asked Jackson to “defend the court” by opposing the Left’s attempts to expand the bench.
“She wouldn’t do that,” he said, noting it “would have been an easy thing for [Jackson] to do to defend the integrity of the court.”
He’s right. Opposition to court packing is not a controversial or even political position. In fact, it’s one held by two of the most persuasive liberal justices to have recently sat on the bench: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
That Brown Jackson refused to make a commitment similar to Ginsburg's and Breyer’s ― either in her McConnell interview or before the Judiciary Committee Tuesday ― suggests she has a far more radical view of the court and its role than they did, one she doesn’t want to reveal in order to preserve her nomination.
Brown Jackson is being pressed on this topic, which means she has the chance to clarify her position and assure the public that she will defend the court’s integrity, regardless of what the Fascist Left wants her to do. Thus far she has refused, and the Senate must vote against her and tell President Joe Biden to go back to the drawing board.
Jackson’s record demands close scrutiny because it doesn’t pass muster — no matter how qualified she might be.
Mike Nichols is an advocate of the counterrevolution with a four-step plan to defeat Leftist Fascism: We Organize. We Stand. We Resist. We Fight. He is a regular contributor to several conservative news websites and has a regular blog and Facebook presence at Americas Conservative Voice-Facebook.