Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is continuing her meetings with senators this week, ahead of confirmation hearings scheduled for the week of March 21. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would like to have her confirmed before April 11, when the Senate is planning to start Easter recess. That schedule might be blown up by Senate Republicans, who are trying to figure out how to appeal to their base by gumming this nomination up while not looking like the racist assholes many of them truly are.
Judge Jackson will be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.She is eminently qualified—with more judicial experience under her belt than Chief Justice John Roberts had at the time he was nominated—and already received votes from several Republicans when she was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. So she’s a particularly hard nominee to oppose, even though it’s a given that the majority of Republicans will. They can’t attack her directly, so it appears they’re going to go after the groups who support her nomination and the process that will confirm her.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell set the stage with a floor statement that was pure trolling.
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“It’s a matter of record that this nominee was the anointed favorite of these fringe groups,” McConnell bleated. “At this time last year they were already spending dark money to raise her profile.” Oh my goodness. Can you imagine? Dark money being spent to pack the court with extremist ideologues. Heavens.
Dark money to raise the profile of a judge who (checks notes) was a speech and debate star in high school, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, then attended Harvard Law School, where she graduated cum laude and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer and built a distinguished career before her elevation to her current position on the second-highest court of the land. Right.
The other trolling comes courtesy of the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who released a statement Monday asking, basically, “What’s the rush?”
“We should not sacrifice the integrity of our constitutional advice and consent responsibility to meet an arbitrary timeline. The Court’s next term doesn’t begin until October, so there’s absolutely no need to rush,” Grassley said, because the “American people rightly expect a full and thorough vetting process.”
Just eight days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September 2020, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett. Her hearings began 13 days after the nomination. She was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate less than a month after hearings began, during the presidential election and, in fact, while early votes were being cast in that election. So, yeah, Republicans will never stop trolling over what they did to President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, nominated in March and blockaded for the entirety of the year, because there was a presidential election happening. All of which Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin’s spokesperson pointed out.
Delay is the favorite game of Republicans under a Democratic majority. That’s why five months into the fiscal year, the government is still operating under the 2021 budget passed in 2020. Delay is also the safest game for them, since going full-on racist would look bad. They’ve outsourced that to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who mocked her last week for having “a name that even Joe Biden has trouble pronouncing” and demanded to see her LSAT score.
McConnell promises the confirmation will be “vigorous, exhaustive and painstaking.” Meaning they will make it take as much time as they possibly can.
“What’s the rush?” one Republican aide asked CNN, rhetorically. That aide said Republicans ”need time to do their due diligence, review her decisions and request and gather records on Jackson’s government experience from when she served as the vice chair of the United States Sentencing Commission.” Uh huh.
One idea circulating among some Republicans is to take the White House up on its offer to have Jackson sit down with any senator who requests a meeting, a deluge of which could consume so much of her time that she might need more preparation before hearings begin in two weeks.
Gosh. How sneaky of them.
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