(Official Washington Examiner editorial, March 25)
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a fine person with an impressive resume, should nonetheless not be confirmed to the Supreme Court. Her record and testimony show she is outside what should be the mainstream of American jurisprudence.
This week’s hearings on Jackson’s nomination were quite valuable because they exposed, in numerous ways, a far-left legal orthodoxy that knows its beliefs, values, and legal reasoning are not shared by the vast majority of voters. That’s why Jackson and her Democratic Senate enablers so often obfuscated and misled whenever directly challenged.
For example, despite having a history of paying homage to critical race theory, Jackson repeatedly spoke during the hearings as if she were barely familiar with its precepts.
Likewise, to protect legal options for the aggressive agenda of transgender activists, she infamously claimed to not know how to define a “woman.” And even when Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse repeatedly teed up a softball for her, almost begging her to agree that college students should have no heckler’s veto against free speech, she kept dodging commitment on that issue as well.
Meanwhile, even if there may be good explanations for some of Jackson’s sentencing decisions, it is simply a fact that Jackson has spent a quarter-century, in multiple forums and jobs, suggesting, and ruling, that child pornographers be treated more leniently. The problem, though, is broader than that. Even no-nonsense legal analysts who said Republican questioners failed to acknowledge the context in her favor regarding child pornographers noted that her “theory” of sentencing would undermine the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of leniency all across the board, not just with sex offenders.
The larger problem in all this, though, isn’t that Jackson’s jurisprudential approach is uniquely objectionable — although, despite some nods to reason, it is objectionable — but that she appears to be part of a whole leftist legal movement that is hostile to American norms…. [The full editorial is at this link.]
