There were two positive aspects to Monday morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to advance the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to a floor vote. The first and most important was that the judge did not have to attend. The second was that virtually all of the screaming from last month’s confirmation hearings had stopped. Senate Republicans, well aware of how poorly the howling and browbeating of the witness had gone over in the polling that took place last week—polling that established Jackson as possibly the most popular Supreme Court nominee in history—seem to have decided that to persist in shouting and threats may be counter-productive.
A Quinnipiac poll released last week showed that more than half (52 percent) of respondents disapproved of how Republican senators had handled the Jackson hearings.
Or put another way by Sen. Cory Booker from the Democratic side of the aisle: Take away the fury and the outrage and all you really have left is Festivus, a holiday of invented grievance. What was left after toning down all the cooked up indignation over all the imagined judicial solicitude for child sex offenders? Some rewarmed grievance over the initially failed appellate nomination of Black conservative Judge Janice Rogers Brown, exhumed from 2003, which seemingly blazes hotter in the blood of Sens. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz than it did even 20 years ago. After Democrats blocked Rogers Brown’s nomination in 2003, George W. Bush re-nominated her in 2005 and she was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, but never nominated to the Supreme Court, as Cruz and Graham kept implying could have happened were it not for those nefarious Democrats, despite five openings for a pair of Republican presidents. (A viral piece of misinformationcurrently claims Brown was in fact nominated to the Supreme Court, roiling the GOP base by stretching the invented grievance far beyond any semblance of truth.) In the GOP telling Monday, Brown was evidently the last Black woman in modern history qualified to sit on a federal appeals court, as Donald Trump failed to place a single Black woman on the courts of appeals or seat her at the Supreme Court.
Between this, and the never-quite coherent claims about Judge Jackson’s alleged love for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, and her allegedly elaborate plans for court expansion (that also don’t exist), Republicans lacked substance to the point that they dipped back into some of their cherrypicked, fake QAnon child sex predator claims. Those smears have been debunked by everyone ranging from the leaders of the conservative legal movement and the American Bar Association, to policing groups and the Republicans’ own hearing expert on child sex trafficking. What was left after all that supposed heat went missing was just some weird, defrosted Pizzagate.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/04/ted-cruz-republican-grooming-smear-judge-jackson.html