Day Four — The Well-Qualified K. B. J.

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. Update(s) if any will appear at the bottom of this post. /~Rayne]

It’s the fourth and final day of U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Today’s hearing is in progress.

Today’s hearing consists of three remaining panels (Judge Jackson was Panel I):

Panel II

The Honorable Ann Claire Williams
American Bar Association
Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary

Ms. D. Jean Veta
American Bar Association
Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary

Mr. Joseph M. Drayton
American Bar Association
Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary

Panel III Majority

The Honorable Joyce Beatty
United States House of Representatives
State of Ohio – 3rd District

Ms. Risa Goluboff
Dean, Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law, and Professor of History
University of Virginia

Mr. Wade Henderson
President & CEO
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Mr. Richard B. Rosenthal
Captain Frederick Thomas
National President
National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE)

Panel III Minority

The Honorable Steve Marshall
Attorney General
State of Alabama

Ms. Jennifer Mascott
Assistant Professor of Law & Co-Executive Director
The C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Ms. Eleanor McCullen
Anti-abortion activist

Ms. Keisha Russell
First Liberty

Ms. Alessandra Serano
Operation Underground Railroad

From the looks of the last three panelists, the GOP senators are continuing to play to the base by hammering Judge Jackson on abortion, religious freedom in public schools, and human trafficking. The last will likely fit with the crap Sen. Josh Hawley et al already tattooed about child pornography.

The GOP will want to leave that shitty taste of zealotry and bigotry in the audience’s mouths as the hearings end. In other words, on brand for the GOP.

You can watch live feed at these sites (not the same links as yesterday’s as the previous links may lead to recordings previous days’ hearings):

Senate Judiciary Committee hearing feed

PBS Senate Judiciary Committee hearing feed on YouTube

C-SPAN feed via YouTube

You can also catch the hearings through these live Twitter threads:

Rewire News Group

Chris Geidner at Grid News

If you know of anyone else covering today’s hearing in Twitter, please leave a comment below. Thanks!

~ ~ ~

Apparently these hearings weren’t really to determine a nominee’s qualifications for a lifetime appointment to SCOTUS or to ensure the public was informed. No, apparently the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings have been little more than social media opportunities, which Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) called out.


Sasse also expressed his concern about cameras in the court room, that “cameras change human behavior,” and yet the difference between the video above by C-SPAN versus this by CBS News below tells us cameras tell us things audio and written reporting don’t offer.


Or this photo by Los Angeles Times’ Kent Nishimura:

If you have a Twitter account, every once in a while for grins and giggles you should drop Sen. Ted Cruz (Senate account: @sentedcruz, personal account: @tedcruz) a tweet and let him know what you thought of his performance as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wholly visible on all sorts of cameras.

~ ~ ~

There may be more to come, watch this space for updates.

25 replies
  1. Al Ostello says:

    Any different headline image might be helpful with many daily blog posts in a row. My 2 cents worth.

    • Rayne says:

      Thanks but no. The point is that these four posts are all related to a single topic — easily discerned by the use of the same “label” image.

      • Duke says:

        Thank you for your work. Your ability to be detailed, concise, and beautifully expressive is a trait which I wasn’t blessed with.

  2. jaango1 says:

    Some 20 years ago and after I dedicated myself to political writing, I quickly learned the value of the ongoing the Three Stereotypes, and which are critical for understanding yesterday’s and today’s politics.

    They are:

    1. The Native American….”He’s just another white man.”
    2. The Chicano: “El gringo quere componer todo con su, ‘I’m sorry.”
    3. The White Version…”I don’t care…I’ll be dead…So, what’s your point;'”

    And thanks Rayne, for listing today’s Responders, and of course, the media makes no mention of having Responders speaking of and to the Chicano and Native American audiences. And to add a little humour to this
    ‘attitudinal escapism, the Constitution made no mention of anything related to the disappearance of the almost 2,000 languages that have fallen by the wayside. Today, there are only 20 of these indigenous languages remaining.

    • Duke says:

      The weight of the loss language also includes the loss of personal memories and history.

      Indigenous peoples of the Americas are who I celebrate on Columbus day and the Fourth of July.

  3. Jenny says:

    Thank you Rayne for the laundry list of participants at todays hearing.

    Having watched for three days, my conclusion –
    Disgraceful: Hawley, Cruz, Cotton, Graham and Blackburn. Four bullies and one mean girl.

    Proud of Judge Jackson who showed grace and dignity under pressure. Her smile radiates the room. Lovely to see Senator Booker’s passion and joy plus has her back.
    I look forward to seeing her on the Supreme Court.

    • Tracy Lynn says:

      I wept as I watched Cory Booker’s statement. I can’t bear to watch the rest of the BS the Republicans are throwing out, so I check in with Twitter every so often. It’s breathtaking how low they will go.

      • Jenny says:

        Tracy, I too wept with Senator Booker’s compassionate statement. A genuine moment from the heart.

        As for the GOP, very low vibration bonded in the drug of hate.

  4. DrFunguy says:

    Can anyone vouch for the accuracy of this meme seen today on the Internet:
    “For the first 127 years when only white Christian man were allowed to be supreme court justices, there were zero confirmation hearings. Confirmation hearing was invented for the first Jewish nominee.“

  5. harpie says:

    Alabama Attorney General, a Witness Against Ketanji Brown Jackson, Refuses to Say President Biden Was ‘Duly Elected’
    https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/alabama-attorney-general-a-witness-against-ketanji-brown-jackson-refuses-to-say-president-biden-was-duly-elected/ Mar 24th, 2022, 1:37 pm

    […] Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, had appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to offer testimony against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. […]

    As per procedure, committee members had the opportunity to question the witnesses after making their prepared remarks, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) used that time to hone in on Marshall’s possible role [J6] […]

    Marshall was the chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). The policy arm of RAGA, the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), had put out a robocall encouraging people to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” […]

    • harpie says:

      […]
      WHITEHOUSE: “Pretty simple question, yes or no, did you personally solicit money to support the robocall that brought people to the Capitol and then assaulted the Capitol?”
      MARSHALL: “No”
      WHITEHOUSE: [Did you have] “any contact with members of Congress in any effort to keep the electoral process open through objections to give those coming to assault the Capitol time to breach the Capitol and disrupt the elections process?”
      MARSHALL: “No.”
      […]

      That was ALL BEFORE MARSHALL, when asked multiple times, REFUSED to say
      BIDEN is the “duly elected and lawfully serving president of the United States?”

      • Leoghann says:

        Steve Marshall was elected Alabama Attorney General by the same people who repeatedly elected sexual abuser Roy Moore to be chief justice of their Supreme Court. The only real qualification that’s important to be elected to public office in most of Alabama is “white supremacist.”

  6. viget says:

    I feel like the role of RAGA in J6 has been woefully underreported. There was a lot of coordination there.

  7. Scott Johnson says:

    If there’s some hope in all of this, Jackson seems to be polling well: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/23/politics/gallup-poll-americans-support-ketanji-brown-jackson/index.html

    Caveat is that the poll was taken before this week’s hearings, but I’ve seen nothing that is likely to move the needle on public opinion; no gaffes from the judge. The racists who would oppose her because she’s Black; the conservatives who would do likewise because she’s liberal, opposed her from day one.

    Of course, polling doesn’t matter; what matters is whether Manchin or Sinema might decide to vote nay. So far, haven’t seen any indication that they plan to defect on this issue.

    But fingers crossed.

  8. Molly Pitcher says:

    So just what is going to happen about the little problem of Justice Thomas and his charming wife, Virginia ?

    The Washington Post
    Alert March 24, 5:22 p.m. EDT

    “Virginia Thomas urged Trump’s White House chief of staff to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show
    In messages to chief of staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after Election Day, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called Joe Biden’s victory “the greatest Heist of our History” and told him that President Donald Trump should not concede.”

    • bmaz says:

      Probably nothing. Doubt she has any liability here, and the only way to attack Clarence is via impeachment, and that obviously will never work.

  10. Sandwichman says:

    This may be of minor interest but the “counsel” from First Liberty Institute, Keisha Russell lifted, verbatim, her attack on Immanuel Kant and Critical Race Theory from a column in the Washington Post last November by Marc Thiessen. Thiessen was summarizing the crackpot theory about Kant and the Enlightenment of Princeton History Professor Allen Guelzo. Guelzo’s theory was a bit more nuanced than the Thiessen/Russell version… but not much. I tracked down the likely source for Guelzo’s views about Kant (assuming that it wasn’t first hand knowledge of the texts) and the source was scathing in his denunciation of Guelzo’s interpretation.

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