Distorted Reality
Senate Republicans are painting a false portrait of Ketanji Brown Jackson.
By David Leonhardt
March 24, 2022
Updated 8:21 a.m. ET
Here are a few facts about Ketanji Brown Jackson:
- She frequently associates herself with a patriotic narrative of American history. “The first of my many blessings,” she told the Senate this week, “is the fact that I was born in this great nation.”
- She is not an advocate of critical race theory or other progressive ideas about education. She has never taken a public position on hot-button school issues like whether young children should be taught about gender identity.
- As a federal judge, she has a mainstream record, broadly typical of a Democratic nominee. She has often praised law enforcement, including her proud mention this week that her brother and two of her uncles worked as police officers.
You might not know any of this — you might well believe the opposite — if you spent the past few days listening to Republican senators or consuming many conservative media sources.
Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing has turned into a case study of how disconnected from reality large parts of the Republican ecosystem have become. I know that description sounds harsh and will bother some conservative readers. But I think the facts warrant it.
Birtherism to pornography
The debate over Jackson’s nomination has often had little to do with her. It has become an argument over a nominee who does not exist — one who does not respect America, is not truly religious, coddles child abusers and terrorists and has highly developed views about the importance of “woke” education. Yesterday, conservative activists used this portrayal to pressure moderate Democratic senators to vote against Jackson.
Conspiracy theories and unfair accusations have a long history in American politics, of course. But they have often remained on the margins. Today, distortions and falsehoods have moved to the center of politics.
While neither party is entirely innocent, there is a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats. False claims regularly flow from the leaders of the Republican Party — including its most recent president, several of its likely future presidential candidates and the most influential media figures aligned with the party.
Donald Trump began his political career by claiming that Barack Obama was born in Africa and ended his presidency with false accusations of voter fraud. Prominent Republicans regularly cast doubt on the fact that greenhouse gases are warming the planet and contributing to extreme weather. Disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines has been so widespread that almost 40 percent of Republican adults have not received a shot, sometimes with fatal consequences.
There is no comparable list of false information coming from senior members of the Democratic Party.
The Jackson hearings have become the latest example. Several Republican senators — including Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz yesterday — have tried to portray her as soft on child pornographers. Their argument depends on a misleading cherry-picking of facts from cases she has heard.
A useful debunking appeared this week in National Review, the conservative magazine, written by Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor who noted that he disagreed with Jackson on many legal matters. McCarthy also wrote that Hawley’s accusations were “meritless to the point of demagoguery” and “a smear.” Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has pointed out that some Trump nominees had a similar record as Jackson in child-pornography cases, and that Hawley voted to confirm them.
Woke education has become another focus of the hearings, with Republicans like Cruz and Marsha Blackburn trying to portray Jackson as an advocate for it. In truth, she has not taken a position on the issues that fall under that category. Her sole — tenuous — connection to them is serving on the board of Georgetown Day School, an elite private school in Washington.
That was apparently enough for the Republican National Committee to tweet an image of her this week, with her initials — KBJ — crossed out and replaced with CRT, an abbreviation for critical race theory. (Much of the Republican criticism of Jackson probably would have applied to any nominee, regardless of race, but it is hard to imagine the same tweet about a white judge.)
The only time Jackson appears to have mentioned critical race theory publicly was in a 2015 speech. It was part of a list of disciplines that she said had an intellectual connection to criminal sentencing, including administrative law, philosophy, psychology and statistics.
A fairer critique
To be fair, Republicans are correct that many of the broader issues are legitimate matters of public debate. And on some of them, Republicans can make a credible case that progressive Democrats are to the left of public opinion (as Thomas Edsall, a Times Opinion columnist, explains).
Most Americans oppose cutting police budgets, for instance. Many believe that allowing all transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports can be unfair to other girls. Many voters — and not just white voters — think that liberals focus too much on racial identity. Most Americans feel proud of the country and its symbols, including those that some progressives consider racist, like Thanksgiving, the Constitution, the flag and George Washington.
But in trying to make Jackson a stand-in for these views, Republican senators are distorting reality. They are creating a caricature of a liberal Democrat that bears little resemblance to Jackson herself.
“One thing that is striking about this hearing,” Lori Ringhand, a legal scholar, told The Times, “is how little effort we are seeing to engage the nominee on her views about actual legal issues.”
More on the hearings
After hours of patiently responding to accusations, Jackson displayed some pique at Hawley’s focus on pornography and later dabbed her eyes as Senator Cory Booker praised her life story.
A few Republican senators, including John Cornyn and Mike Lee, took a different approach, turning down the temperature to ask substantive questions.
We do have one thing in common, we are both very comfortable with the lives we made for ourselves. My little 20' x 60' foot vegetable garden gives me all the satisfaction I need in life. Why would I be jealous for not going to college? That was my decision. For all i know a college education would have transformed me into something resembling YOU.