The panel outside witnesses testifying about Jackson made opening statements that emphasized the dueling points that Democrats and Republicans have sought to present about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The Democratic witnesses leaned into the historical significance of Jackson’s ascent to the Supreme Court, while highlighting the particular characteristics the judge’s supporters say make her qualified for the post.
“We have waited far too long for this day, but we are nonetheless overjoyed that it has finally arrived. Judge Jackson’s presence on the court will matter tremendously,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Even as she cheered the prospect of a Jackson confirmation that “glass ceiling that many Americans… believe that they would never live to see it broken,” Rep. Joyce Beatty urged the Senate to remember “that Judge Jackson’s confirmation vote must not be isolated to her gender or to her race.”
“Instead, I urge you to closely examine her credentials and her sterling judicial records,” Beatty, a Democrat who represents Ohio, said. “To me they read like a story book for perfectly prepared juris to sit on the nation’s highest court.”
Attorney Richard Rosenthal, who has known Jackson since childhood said she has been one of the “kindest, warmest, most humble and down to earth people I have ever met.”
Risa Goluboff – the dean of University of Virginia Law School who is testifying in her personal capacity — connected Jackson’s qualities to those of the justice she clerked for and may now well replace.
“Justice [Stephen] Breyer and Justice Jackson share their deeply held patriotism,” she said, adding that, like Breyer, Jackson “has always been as interested in hearing the views of others as in sharing her own.”
As Republicans have zeroed in on Jackson’s record on crime, Captain Frederick Thomas, the national president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, discussed the group’s endorsement of her nomination.
The Republican witnesses reiterated the main qualms GOP senators say that they have with Jackson, like that that she is supposedly soft on crime and that she has not shown herself to have the type of judicial philosophy that Republicans approve of.
One of the witnesses, Eleanor McCullen, spoke at length about her anti-abortion activism outside of clinics and how she was “deeply saddened” by an amicus brief that Jackson, as a private attorney, filed in support of a clinic buffer zone law that McCullen challenged in court.
First Liberty Institute associate counsel Keisha Russell discussed at length “critical race theory,” an academic theory that Republicans have claimed, without evidence, influences Jackson’s jurisprudence. Alessandra Serano, an anti-human trafficking advocate at Operation Underground Railroad, decried the trend of judges issuing sentences in child pornography below the advisory guidelines – an aspect of Jackson’s record that some Republicans have critiqued. (Jackson is in the mainstream of judges in how she handles these cases, and Serano’s opening testimony did not cite anything specific in Jackson’s record that suggested she was an outlier.)
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall stressed the tough on crime messaging, telling the committee that, “The Senate must now do its due diligence to ensure that the ideology of the anti-incarceration and anti-police movement, views the Biden administration seemingly has increasingly embraced, is never permitted to make its way onto our Supreme Court.”
Administrative law professor Jennifer Mascott warned that Jackson “may have a different view than traditionally applied methods of originalism,” the philosophy favored by some Republican appointed judges.
Source: www.cnn.com