Going into this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, it was no secret that Missouri senator Josh Hawley was planning to focus on her record in dealing with sentences for child-predator and pornography offenders. It’s safe to say the general reaction in Washington on both sides of the political barricade was eye-rolling. This was a predictably demagogic move by an extremist Republican with presidential ambitions: taking the low road while perhaps blowing a dog whistle toward QAnon-Pizzagate enthusiasts who generally think Democrats are in league with human traffickers and devil worshippers.
As it turned out, Hawley was far from alone. And by day three of the hearings, he was coming across as more civil on this topic than his colleagues Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Marsha Blackburn (Lindsey Graham was highly uncivil as well, but had other political fish to fry). Without getting into all the sordid details of the innuendoes Judiciary Committee Republicans purveyed against Jackson in focusing on a handful of cases she decided as a trial judge, it’s clear at least some of them thought they had struck political gold. It’s worth asking why that was the case.
It was pretty clearly not just a shout-out to MAGA extremists. And it pretty clearly did represent just one prong of a GOP message we will hear a lot more during the midterm-election campaigns: Liberals are soft on criminals and other abnormal people, and hostile to parents and children.
As Washington Post political reporter Dave Weigel pointed out, the whole litany is common among Republicans around the country:
Hawley’s focus on sentencing requirements for child sex offenders comes straight from the campaign trail, where cracking down on sexual predators and pornographers is a guaranteed winner in general elections, especially in law enforcement and judicial races — even when there’s criticism of stings that capture people with no criminal records …
Republican politicians and activists have also, increasingly, used the language of child pornography crackdowns to pull sexually explicit books out of school libraries, asking whether the liberals who want this material available to children are “grooming” them for abuse. What might make some Republicans nervous in the Senate Judiciary Committee is a common topic in state politics.
Even more obviously, the idea that schools are corrupting children sexually is not unrelated to the whole furor over critical race theory, whereby liberals are supposedly corrupting kids intellectually as well. It’s no surprise that Cruz and Blackburn plowed that particular furrow in the Jackson hearings, and if there had been a way to tie the judge to COVID-19 mask requirements and school closures, we would have heard about that too. The big idea is that Democrats and the judges they appoint don’t care about families and their prerogatives, instead siding with bureaucrats and other liberal elites.
The idea of lenient liberal judges is also one prong in perhaps the biggest culture-war issue of all this year: a crime panic based on real if often selective and contorted spikes in certain crimes (though even then typically at levels well below those of past decades). This was Tom Cotton’s particular emphasis during the Jackson hearings. In his opening statement, the Arkansas senator accused the Biden administration of “lawlessness” and of orchestrating “the breakdown of society.” He then went on to characterize Jackson as virtually the ally of criminals guilty of sex and drug offenses. All of this is sadly familiar to those of us old enough to remember a whole generation of conservative pols who accused the “Earl Warren Court” of “taking the handcuffs off the criminals and putting them on the police.”
There were clearly some unique reasons this particular hearing attracted this sort of Republican rhetoric. Jackson was both a trial judge (of the sitting Supreme Court justices, only Sonia Sotomayor has that sort of background) and a prominent member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency aimed at reducing unfair sentencing practices. So there was an unusual amount of material her opponents could exploit to depict her as someone unwilling to throw the book at bad people. She is also a woman, a leading indicator of softness on crime in the eyes of some conservatives. And, of course, Jackson is Black, and thus presumed in some circles to have sympathy for criminal offenders in the urban “shitholes” (to use the 45th president’s term) where so many Black folks live. A hearing drawing rare public attention to legal and constitutional issues made these associations of a judge with so many fears unsurprising, if indefensible.
Some embarrassed Republicans will likely try to distance themselves from the demagogues of the Judiciary Committee minority. But most of the GOP members tossed in at least an occasional expression of concern over Judge Jackson’s sentencing practices. More tellingly, all of them other than Ben Sasse signed onto Ted Cruz’s letter demanding access to highly sensitive and generally closed presentencing reports in the child-porn cases Hawley and Cruz had focused on. They were hoping to further interrogate Jackson’s sentencing decisions — a step that would have delayed the confirmation hearings for an indefinite period of time and further focused the proceedings on this tiny part of her judicial record. Committee chairman Dick Durbin slapped down the effort to drag the hearings into a morass of Republican midterm messaging, but that’s clearly where the GOP wanted them to go. It wasn’t an accident, and it was almost certainly more of a precursor to more of the same.
