Like too much else in the increasingly divided house that is the United States, Supreme Court confirmation hearings are bitterly divided along partisan lines. But, for all the hypocritical politicking, there’s a notable difference when it’s a Democrat rather than a Republican nominee.
When Republicans nominate a candidate, the Democrats scream, stamp their feet and throw their toys. The lickspittle media dredge up obvious bogus sex scandals. Leftist activists storm the Supreme Court and scream in lawmakers’ faces. Nobody is storming the Court or screaming at Joe Biden nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
But Republicans are quietly holding up Jackson’s judicial record to the spotlight. What’s emerging isn’t pretty.
Jackson was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee for day two of her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and was asked by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., about a 2019 ruling in which Jackson blocked a Trump-era effort to expand the use of expedited removal of illegal immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security had sought to expand the scope of expedited removal from those who had been in the country for 14 days and were close to the border, to anyone anywhere in the country who had been in the country illegally for under two years.
Immigration advocates sued in an attempt to block the rule, and Jackson issued a preliminary injunction blocking the expansion.
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As Grassley pointed out, Congress had given DHS “sole and unreviewable discretion”, something Jackson noted in her judgement — before taking it on herself to review it, anyway.
On the other hand, Jackson found it in herself to uphold two Trump-era programs which greased the skids for “asylum seekers”.
Republican senator Lindsay Graham pointed out that, despite Jackson denying that she is a judicial activist:
“Every group that wants to pack the court, that believes this court is a bunch of right-wing nuts who are going to destroy America, that consider the Constitution trash, all wanted you picked,” Graham said.
But it was Jackson’s record on sentencing child porn offenders that lent the Republicans their heaviest ammunition. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, a Democrat, tried to spike their guns first.
Durbin also gave Jackson the chance to respond to [Josh Hawley‘s] child porn comments. The GOP senator laid out several cases Monday in which he said Jackson handed down sentences that were lighter than what federal sentencing guidelines recommended or what prosecutors asked for.
“As a mother and a judge who has had to deal with these cases, I was thinking that nothing could be further from the truth,” Jackson said.
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Except that it’s absolutely the truth. The record shows that, of seven cases, Jackson consistently delivered sentences that were either at the lowest end recommend; two of them were well under recommended guidelines, two of them the absolute lowest permitted under the law.
In another case, where the defendant possessed dozens of images and videos, and distributed many of them, sentencing guidelines recommended 97-121 months in prison. Jackson gave the defendant just three months.
Another defendant was convicted of travelling across state lines to engage in sexual intercourse with a child and also possessed six separate thumb drives of child pornography. Sentencing guidelines say the paedophile should have got 46-57 months. Jackson handed out just 37 months.
Lindsay Graham also noted Jackson’s work on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees, and just how that’s worked: “Look at the frigging Afghan government it’s made up former detainees at Gitmo”.
