Judge Kitangi Brown-Jackson’s confirmation hearings may be historic in that she is the first black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court.
But they’ve never been seen, at least as far as the questions about crime and race she’s faced from some Republican senators, like Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who have tried to portray her as “soft on crime.”
Civil rights attorney Shireen Eiffel is president, director, and emeritus counsel at NAACP Legal Defense education fund, chirp On Tuesday after hearing Cotton’s question, Jackson reminded her of Senator John McClellan, who had tried to block Thurgood Marshall’s nomination for the Supreme Court by exploiting the nation’s riots and playing on Americans’ fears about crime during his confirmation hearing in 1967. Marshall was the first black Supreme Court justice in the country.
On Twitter Tuesday, Evil wrote that an Arkansas senator “attempting to link a Black Scotus candidate with rising serious crime rates is also a page from Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation hearing.”
Jay Oriel Charles, a professor at Harvard Law School, attributed it to what he described as a mixture of “extreme partisanship” and racial and gender dynamics.
“There’s no doubt that Republicans are trying to score as many partisan points as possible with their base, and that they think there is some revenge to be paid for past Republican candidates,” like Amy Connie Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, he said. “So obviously part of their motivation is biased. One has to take that into account.”
He said there was no doubt that Scott and other Republican senators such as Ted Cruz “didn’t care enough about gender and racial dynamics” to accuse the first black woman to be nominated for the Supreme Court of leniency with crime and distort her record. as a judge and writing it when she was a law student, which Cruz did. Cruz, who represents Texas, spent his time Tuesday afternoon questioning Jackson about her views on critical race theory and whether children were racist. He also suggested that she pamper the criminals.
“Certainly, the racial aspect of it with Thurgood Marshall, there’s a continuity there,” Charles said. He said Jackson’s treatment is more complicated when you add gender, partisanship, and race.
Candidates like Jackson who have served as public advocates or, more broadly, for civil rights, have often been portrayed as “a kind of ardent or compromising advocate,” said Lisa Cellar Barrett, director of policy for the NAACP’s Nonpartisan Legal Defense and Education Trust. with a crime.”
Indeed, Barrett said, “They have often dedicated large parts of their careers to upholding the ideals and laws of this country.”
She said that Jackson’s diverse background, which includes nearly a decade as a federal judge, first in the US District Court for the District of Columbia and then in the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was used to discredit her for “her credentials and qualifications for the position are unquestioned and unquestionable” . Jackson, who has won backing from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in the previous three installations, received an award the support From the Order of the Brothers from the Police. These are among the reasons why Charles said that the suggestion that she was a pamper of criminals could not be further from the truth.
“Part of what really interests me, quite frankly, is that it very much belongs in the mold of God, country, service candidate,” Charles said. All three are qualities that Republican senators claim to look for in a Supreme Court judge, he said.
“It’s not even close to the person being photographed,” Charles said.
Tiffany Wright, associate professor at Howard University and director of the Human and Civil Rights Clinic, said Jackson’s experiences as a black woman prepared her for this moment.
“This is her fourth Senate hearing, and then the only one in this profession, she’s so accustomed to some kind of false attack on her ideology, her opinions, her judicial approach, her qualifications,” Wright said. “So I think this is like, light work for her. I’ve been so proud of the way she really stays on top of the board.”
Still, Wright said, Cruz’s questions were an “insult to the whole process,” as was Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, who took the quotes out of context and asked Jackson to identify what the woman was.
Jackson replied, “I’m not a biologist.”
Charles Wright said Jackson also made racial slurs during the sessions, including from Senator John Neely Kennedy, a Republican from No. , who told her several times that she was “smart and eloquent”.
“You could tell there was kind of an attempt to vaccinate themselves,” Charles said. “They start by saying, ‘You’re so qualified, you’re so clever, you’re so smart. “
He said it was a poor attempt to suggest that they were focusing on her record and not engaging in the lure of race or treating her differently.
Wright said it was a weight that blacks used to carry.
“We shouldn’t,” she said. “She shouldn’t have done it. But she did. That’s how she ended up here. And that just speaks of how far we haven’t come, and at the same time, how far we’ve come, and the fact that there’s a black woman sitting there for the first time in history.”
Barrett said she hopes that, in the midst of the attacks, people won’t lose focus on what really matters, which she said was the diversity of Jackson’s professional and personal experience and what it would mean to the court if confirmed.
“Her confirmation will not alter the court’s ideological balance,” Barrett said. “But it’s really a significant step forward in bringing us closer to the court that reflects the multiracial, multiracial society in which we live.”
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