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      Senate judiciary committee nears vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson

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      Senate judiciary committee nears vote on Ketanji Brown JacksonCommittee vote expected to be evenly split, 11-11, forcing Democrats to ‘discharge’ the nomination The Senate judiciary committee on Monday neared a vote on the historic nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, poised to be the first Black woman confirmed to the supreme court.Following days of interrogation and debate over Jackson’s qualifications, the committee vote was expected to be evenly split, 11-11. That would force Democrats to “discharge” the nomination, delaying but not denying confirmation.Before the vote could take place, the committee adjourned to await the arrival of its 22nd member, the California Democrat Alex Padilla, whose flight to Washington was delayed.A vote to discharge Jackson’s nomination was expected as early as Monday evening. That would set up hours of additional debate on the Senate floor.Democrats and the White House hope to confirm Jackson to the lifetime position on the court before Congress recesses for the Easter holiday on Friday. The 51-year-old was confirmed by the Senate to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit last year with the support of three Republicans.Ketanji Brown Jackson to receive rare Republican vote as Collins says yesRead moreOnly one of those Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, has committed to voting for her again.Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has said he will not support Jackson’s nomination to the supreme court​​, calling her an “activist to the core”, outside the judicial mainstream.Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has not said how she intends to vote, but is seen as one of only two more Republicans, along with Mitt Romney of Utah, who might support Jackson.If confirmed, Jackson will replace the retiring liberal justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she clerked, and would make history as the first Black woman and only the sixth woman to sit on the court in more than 200 years. Her confirmation would, however, do nothing to change the ideological balance of a court on which conservatives outnumber liberals 6-3.In his opening remarks on Monday, Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee’s Democratic chair, praised Jackson’s “impeccable qualifications” and said her experience as a public defender would bring a “missing perspective to the court”.“This committee’s action today in nothing less than making history,” Durbin said. “I’m honored to be a part of it. I will strongly and proudly support Judge Jackson’s nomination.”Durbin also lamented Republican hostility toward Jackson, accusing senators of leveraging “vile” and “discredited” attacks on her record and character.“She stayed calm and collected. She showed dignity, grace and poise,” Durbin said. “It is unfortunate that our hearing came to that, but if there is one positive to take away from these attacks, it is that the nation got to see the temperament of a good, strong person truly ready to serve on the highest court in the land.”Many Republicans used the hearing on Monday to rehash their attacks on Jackson, accusing her of handing down lenient sentences to child sex crime offenders when she was a federal trial court judge, a claim independent factcheckers have said is baseless and lacks context.During her hearings, Jackson forcefully defended her record, telling senators these were among the most traumatic and haunting cases she dealt with and that she did her “duty to hold the defendants accountable”.Republicans also sought to portray Jackson as “soft on crime”, a line of attack dismissed outright by the American Bar Association, which testified that she was strongly qualified for the position.Republicans on the committee appear uniformly opposed to Jackson’s nomination, starting with the ranking member, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who announced he would not vote to confirm Jackson because “she and I have fundamental, different views on the role of judges and the role that they should play in our system of government”.On Monday, Graham again used his time to decry Democrats’ treatment of nominees named by Republican presidents.“If we were in charge, she would not have been before this committee,” Graham said.His point was that Republican control of the Senate would have forced Democrats to put forward a more “moderate” – in his view – nominee. But Democrats saw the comment as a plain-spoken acknowledgment of Republicans’ hardball tactics when it comes to the supreme court, after the GOP refused to let Barack Obama fill a vacancy in 2016 – an act without precedent.Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, compared proceedings on Jackson’s nomination to Festivus, the holiday celebrated on the TV series, Seinfeld.“There’s been a lot of airing of grievances,” Booker said, adding: “I’ve heard things that are just ridiculous.”During more than 30 hours of hearings last month, Jackson pledged to be an independent justice who would decide cases from a “neutral position”. She defended her record while reflecting on her personal story as the daughter of public school teachers in the segregated south.As the 22-member panel convened on Monday, Joe Biden said Jackson would “bring extraordinary qualifications, deep experience and intellect, and a rigorous judicial record to the supreme court.“She deserves to be confirmed as the next justice.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtUS SenateLaw (US)US politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson to receive rare Republican vote as Collins says yes

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson to receive rare Republican vote as Collins says yesMaine senator says she will vote to confirm Joe Biden’s nominee: ‘There can be no question she is qualified’ The Maine senator Susan Collins will vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court, giving Joe Biden’s nominee a rare Republican vote as she proceeds towards becoming the first Black woman ever to sit on the nine-judge panel.Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing reveals racist fears of Republicans | Steve PhillipsRead more“I have decided to support the confirmation of Judge Jackson to be a member of the supreme court,” Collins, a Republican moderate, told the New York Times after meeting the nominee a second time.“There can be no question that [Jackson] is qualified to be a supreme court justice.”The confirmation was not in doubt. Democrats need only their own 50 votes in the evenly divided Senate to put Jackson on the court, given the casting vote of the vice-president, Kamala Harris. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, had already confirmed his support.But the vice-president’s tie-breaking vote has never been required to confirm a supreme court justice, making Collins’ vote at least symbolically important.Collins’ support also comes at a time of bitter partisan divide that was underscored by hostile and politically loaded questioning of Jackson led by white, hard-line Republican men, prominently including Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.Ahead of a confirmation vote next week, other Republican moderates could follow Collins and announce support for Jackson. In particular, Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican nominee for president, has said he has not yet decided.Jackson will replace Stephen Breyer when he retires this summer. As Breyer is a member of the outmatched liberal group on the court, his replacement will not alter the 6-3 conservative majority.Republicans including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have complained that Jackson would not take a position on calls from progressives to expand the court in order to redress its ideological balance, during confirmation hearings last week.Speaking to the Times, Collins said: “In recent years, senators on both sides of the aisle have gotten away from what I perceive to be the appropriate process for evaluating judicial nominees.“In my view, the role under the constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee. It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.”Supreme court confirmations have become highly political and increasingly rancorous.In 2016, as Senate majority leader, McConnell refused even a hearing for Barack Obama’s final nominee, Merrick Garland, thereby holding a seat open in the hope it would be filled by a Republican president. Collins duly voted to confirm Donald Trump’s first nominee, Neil Gorsuch, the beneficiary of such hardball tactics.Collins also voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second nominee, who vehemently denied accusations of sexual assault.‘You’re my star’: high points of Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearingsRead moreBut Collins voted not to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, a hardline conservative installed shortly before the 2020 presidential election in place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal lion, in stark contravention of supposed principles about confirmations close to elections laid out by McConnell four years before.During the Democratic primary in 2020, Joe Biden promised to put a Black woman on the supreme court. Some Republicans voiced opposition to such a promise, disregarding precedent including Trump’s vow to name a woman to replace Ginsburg.In 2021, Collins was one of three Republicans who voted to confirm Jackson to a federal appeals court. The other two were Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – a hostile questioner in Jackson’s supreme court hearings – and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Murkowski has not said which way she will vote this time.Explaining her vote to the Times, Collins cited Jackson’s “breadth of experience as a law clerk, attorney in private practice, federal public defender, member of the US Sentencing Commission and district court judge for more than eight years”.In a tweet, the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, said: “Grateful to Senator Collins for giving fair, thoughtful consideration to Judge Jackson – and all of the president’s judicial nominations.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Republican won’t say whether Capitol attack panel will question Ginni Thomas

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      Republican won’t say whether Capitol attack panel will question Ginni ThomasAdam Kinzinger vows to ‘get to the bottom’ of insurrection after Clarence Thomas’s wife reportedly urged White House to overturn Trump’s election defeat Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members on January 6 committee, on Sunday vowed to “get to the bottom” of events surrounding the 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol but refused to reveal whether the panel intends to question Ginni Thomas – wife of US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas – over reports of her urging the White House to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat.Senior Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from relevant cases and warned the integrity of the supreme court is at stake.Kinzinger refused to confirm or deny the existence of text messages Ginni Thomas is reported to have exchanged with then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, although he did not contest the Washington Post and CBS’s joint revelation last week that they obtained copies of such messages from materials submitted to the congressional committee by Meadows.“The question for the committee in this or any exchange is ‘was there a conspiracy, or how close did we get to overturning the election?’” he told CBS’s Face the Nation show on Sunday.Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the events surrounding 6 January 2021, said of witnesses being summoned to give evidence to the committee: “We’ll call in whoever we need to call in.”He added: “Was there an effort to overturn the legitimate election of the United States? What was January 6 in relation to that? And what is the rot in our system that led to that and does it still exist today?…We are going to get to the bottom of this.”He did not say whether that “rot” extended to the nation’s highest court.Thomas and her husband are rightwing political darlings who have described themselves as “one being – an amalgam,” according to the New York Times.Amid the latest reports, Justice Thomas is now facing calls to recuse himself from any cases surrounding the 2020 presidential election, the insurrection and potentially the 2024 presidential election, should Trump run for re-election.Time for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from election cases – his wife’s texts prove itRead moreMeanwhile Klobuchar of Minnesota, chairwoman of the Senate rules committee and a member of the Senate judiciary committee, which quizzes nominees for the supreme court, demanded that Clarence Thomas be removed from any such cases.“This is unbelievable,” Klobuchar told ABC’s This Week. “You have the wife of a sitting supreme court justice advocating for an insurrection, advocating for overturning a legal election, to the sitting president’s chief of staff. And she also knows this election, these cases, are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him, from these decisions.”The 29 exchanges reported between Ginni Thomas and Meadows reveal how the wife of one of the land’s top jurists disseminated disinformation related to the QAnon conspiracy theory and other inaccurate arguments during the tempestuous days following the November 2020 election when right-wingers were claiming Democrat Joe Biden had not won.Even as Trump strategized efforts to overturn his defeat through the courts, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas “spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election,” the Post reported.It reported she wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”Pressed about how he and his colleagues would broach Thomas’s alleged attempts to undermine a legitimate US election, Kinzinger said they want to ensure their work is “not driven by a political motivation, it’s driven by facts”.The House select committee has so far hesitated to demand cooperation from Thomas in part because they are worried she may “create a political spectacle to distract from the investigation”, the Guardian previously reported.Klobuchar said: “All I hear is silence from the supreme court right now. And that better change in the coming week because every other federal judge in the country except supreme court justices would have guidance from ethics rules that says you got to recuse. The entire integrity of the court is on the line here.”TopicsUS elections 2020US Capitol attackClarence ThomasUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing reveals racist fears of Republicans | Steve Phillips

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing reveals Republicans’ racist fearsSteve PhillipsRepublicans are becoming so hysterical because people like Judge Jackson pose a revolutionary threat to the status quo “Black Girl Magic” is on full display in the supreme court confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Republicans are apoplectic. The juxtaposition of Jackson’s calm, confident, professionalism with the hostile, cynical and contemptuous questioning by senators such as Texas senator Ted Cruz is an object lesson for the entire world on the ongoing dynamics of systemic racism in the United States.Rather than do their constitutional duty of engage with a prospective supreme court justice on the pressing legal issues of the day, the Republican committee members have opted to throw racist red meat to their rabid white supporters who are gripped by fear of people of color. Cruz led the charge with his attacks on critical race theory, asking Jackson whether she agrees “that babies are racist” and trying to paint the judge as a dangerous person who would force white children to learn about racism.In so doing, Cruz was working from a tried and tired playbook that seeks to dramatize anti-racist demands in ways that fuel white fears about the consequences of Black people attaining positions of power. There is a long history in this country of the leaders of white people trying to force Black people to denounce anti-racist movements as a condition for entry into the highest precincts of power (Cruz is Latino, but his base is largely white). In 2008, the media tried to force Barack Obama to denounce his pastor Jeremiah Wright’s statements forcefully condemning white supremacy. Two decades earlier, Jesse Jackson was dogged by demands that he distance himself from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The point of said attacks is to try to weaken support for the Black person one way or another. Either they distance themselves from Black leaders and movements, thereby diminishing Black enthusiasm, or they refuse to renounce anti-racist voices, and that refusal is then used to scare white people.Cruz and his ilk gravitate to such tactics because white fears about Black people have defined politics in this country for centuries. One of the Republican questioners of Judge Jackson was South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, representative of a state that has been in the forefront of efforts to whip white people into a frenzy about the prospects of Black equality. In 1712, the South Carolina legislature passed the “Slave Laws” – legislation designed to control the behavior of “Negroes and other slaves [who] are of barbarous, wild, savage natures”. South Carolina’s leaders were so extreme in stoking white fears that the state was the first to secede from the Union and turn to violence after Abraham Lincoln’s election on an anti-slavery platform in 1860. Graham’s predecessor, Strom Thurmond, ran for president in 1948, defiantly declaring that, “there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the n—-r race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches!”Today’s Republicans are becoming so hysterical because people like Judge Jackson pose a revolutionary threat to the status quo in that they reveal the ubiquity of Black brilliance. Cruz, Graham and their fellow modern-day Confederates know instinctively that as the public sees how many amazing Black women there are, it becomes much harder to explain why most of the powerful positions in this country are still held by white men. In 233 years, there hasn’t been a single Black woman smart enough to sit on the supreme court? The notion is absurd. So, if it’s not lack of talent, then it must be something else. Like racism and sexism. Exposing this reality is very dangerous to a political party whose power rests on exploiting that racism and sexism (all the while denying it exists).The very fact that Jackson’s nomination is historic and not routine is a profound indictment of the United States of America. Hour after hour, question after question, Judge Jackson – secure in the knowledge that she is simply the latest talented Black woman and not the first – is calmly, confidently and politely taking a wrecking ball to the myth that America is a meritocracy. And the implications of that scare the Republicans to death.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. He is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonOpinionUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      Republicans turn Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing into a political circus

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      Republicans turn Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing into a political circus Solemn proceedings of confirmation hearing took a nosedive into farce with bizarre moments in Jackson’s epic inquisitionAt 2.54pm on the second day of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings that will determine whether she takes a seat on the US supreme court, the solemn proceedings took a nosedive into farce.Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, turned theatrically to an outsized blow-up of a children’s book, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi. Pointing to a cartoon from its pages of an infant in diapers taking their first walk, he asked Jackson: “Do you agree with this book… that babies are racist?”“Senator,” Jackson began with a sigh. And then she paused for seven full seconds, which in the august setting of the Senate judiciary committee hearing felt like a year.For the one and only time in the 13 hours of questioning that Jackson endured that day, the nominee appeared flummoxed. Or was it flabbergasted?Here she was, aged 51, with almost a decade’s experience as a federal judge behind her and, if confirmed, the history-making distinction of becoming the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s highest court ahead of her. And she was being asked whether babies were racist?“I don’t believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or not valued, or less than, that they are victims, oppressors,” she said eventually. When Cruz refused to drop the subject she gave a more direct answer.“I have not reviewed any of those books,” she said. “They don’t come up in my work as a judge, which I’m respectfully here to address.”That Cruz chose to focus on critical race theory (CRT), the years-old academic theory that has become the latest conservative hot-button issue, in his questioning spoke volumes about the brutal social issue politics of today’s Republican party. That he did so to a Black woman lent the exchange the astringency of a racial dog-whistle.Cruz’s attack was not unique. Four hours before he began his interrogation, the official Twitter account of the Republican National Committee posted a gif of the nominee bearing her initials “KBJ” which are then scratched out and replaced with the letters: “CRT”. Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.There was another twist to Cruz’s questioning. The private elementary school at which he claimed CRT was being taught – Antiracist Baby and all – is Georgetown Day School on whose board Jackson sits as a trustee. When GDS was founded in 1945 it too made history as the first integrated school, serving both Black and white children, in the nation’s capital.Lest any of the attendants of the hearings inside the Hart Senate office building or following along on television had doubts about Cruz’s motivations, he grilled Jackson on several other racially-charged subjects. He began by vaunting his own anti-racist credentials by expressing the admiration he shared with Jackson for Martin Luther King.Within seconds of that warm embrace, however, the senator segued to a speech that Jackson made in 2020 – on MLK day – in which she referred to the 1619 Project.The project, initiated by the New York Times, seeks to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the role of African American women front and centre of the national narrative. Cruz asked Jackson if she agreed with some of its more contested conclusions, which he claimed were “deeply inaccurate and misleading”, to which she replied that she had only mentioned it because it was “well known to the students I was talking to”.Again, she stressed, this was a subject that had absolutely nothing to do with her work – or by implication, the job of a supreme court justice.Outside observers were incensed by Cruz’s tactics. “What we saw today was an attempt to assail the character of Ketanji Brown Jackson, because her record is so wholly unassailable,” Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the racial justice organization, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said on MSNBC.Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia and former senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta where King once preached, pondered in the New York Times: “Would they be asking these questions if this were not a Black woman?”There were other awkward moments in Jackson’s epic inquisition, which she survived while barely dropping the perma-smile from her face. There was the moment that Lindsey Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina, flounced out of the hearing having earlier wrongly accused Jackson of having called George W Bush and the then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld “war criminals”.Yet more bizarre was the episode when Marsha Blackburn, Republican senator from Tennessee, asked Jackson whether she could “provide a definition for the word ‘woman’.” “No, I can’t,” came the curt reply.It was all a far cry from the promise delivered by Senator Chuck Grassley, the top Republican in the judiciary committee, at the start of the hearings. There would be no “spectacle” or “political circus” coming from his side of the aisle.Several Republican senators followed that pledge by channelling QAnon. Senators Josh Hawley from Missouri, Cruz and Graham all pursued the inquisitorial line that Jackson had been unduly lenient as a federal district court judge in her sentencing of sex offenders who consume and distribute images of child sex abuse.Though they avoided stating so explicitly, the senators clearly intended to imply that Jackson’s sympathies lay with pedophiles. That’s a short stone’s throw away from the core conspiracy theory peddled by QAnon, the toxic Donald Trump-supporting online movement.At its “Pizzagate” inception during the 2016 presidential campaign, QAnon fantasised about a child trafficking ring around Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders and liberal Hollywood celebrities.As Media Matters has noted, the claim that Jackson was lenient towards sex offenders consuming images of children first surfaced last month. A conservative group American Accountability Foundation (AAF) ran an “investigation” into her writings while a student at Harvard law school in which she explored discrepancies in sentencing policy in such cases.The group misleadingly claimed that her writing exposed her as a radical judicial activist dedicated to “social justice engineering”.Days before the confirmation hearings began, Republican senators had taken up AAF’s lead and were plotting how to use it during the confirmation process. Last week Politico obtained a document that was circulating among the senators in which they rehearsed the claim that the judge “routinely handed out light sentence”, and that the lightest of all were in “child pornography cases”.A pedophile-sympathising, critical race theory-loving, judicial activist, radical leftist social engineer. The vision of the nominee that was presented over hours of Republican grilling made for quite the spectacle.But will the political circus work? “They are trying to find some way to make her look less than qualified,” Nelson concluded. “They failed miserably.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump committed ‘numerous’ felonies, said resigning New York prosecutor – report

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      Trump committed ‘numerous’ felonies, said resigning New York prosecutor – reportNew York Times obtains letter by Mark Pomerantz condemning new district attorney’s decision not to prosecute ex-president A Manhattan prosecutor who investigated Donald Trump’s financial dealings wrote in a resignation letter that he believed Trump “is guilty of numerous felony violations” and blasted the new district attorney for not moving ahead with an indictment, the New York Times reported.Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, two top prosecutors on the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal investigation of Trump, resigned abruptly last month, amid reports that the investigation into the former president’s finances was foundering.The newly elected district attorney, Alvin Bragg, was reportedly more skeptical than his predecessor that the evidence his office’s attorneys had gathered against Trump would be enough to convict him.In a February resignation letter obtained by the New York Times, Pomerantz wrote that the team of lawyers investigating Trump had “no doubt” he had “committed crimes” and that Bragg’s decision not to move ahead with prosecuting Trump “will doom any future prospects that Mr Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating”.“His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people,” Pomerantz reportedly wrote.Republican says Trump asked him to ‘rescind’ 2020 election and remove Biden from officeRead moreThe clock is ticking on the case against Trump, as the current term of the grand jury which has been hearing evidence expires in April.Ronald Fischetti, an attorney for Trump, told the Guardian that the resignation letter simply reflected the prosecuting team’s failure to make a convincing legal case against the former president, describing his client’s “innocence”.“Pomerantz had several occasions to meet with Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, and his senior staff to lay out exactly what he intended to present to the grand jury in order to get an indictment, and he failed,” Fischetti said. “He was unable to convince the DA and his senior staff that he had sufficient evidence to warrant an indictment.”“Mr Bragg should be commended for not doing this on the basis of politics, and just doing it on the basis of law, which he’s supposed to do,” Fischetti said.While the resignation letter conceded that the case against Trump could be challenging and that there were “risks” of bringing it to court, it argued that there was a strong public interest in prosecuting Trump “even if a conviction is not certain”.The former Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance, who had been deeply involved in the case, had “directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible”, Pomerantz reportedly wrote, but Bragg, who was sworn in this January, reviewed the case and did not agree.Pomerantz believed Bragg’s decision not to seek an indictment of Trump was “made in good faith” but also “misguided and completely contrary to the public interest”.Pomerantz did not respond to a request for comment.“The investigation continues,” Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for the district attorney, wrote in an email. “A team of experienced prosecutors is working every day to follow the facts and the law. There is nothing we can or should say at this juncture about an ongoing investigation.”A spokesperson for the Trump Organization called Pomerantz a “never-Trumper” in a statement to the New York Times.TopicsDonald TrumpNew YorkUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson says Roe v Wade ‘the settled law of the supreme court’ – live

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      Key events

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      2.06pm EDT

      14:06

      Psaki tests positive for Covid-19

      11.33am EDT

      11:33

      Jackson: Roe v Wade is ‘settled law’

      8.58am EDT

      08:58

      Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings continue

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      5.42pm EDT

      17:42

      In response to Hawley’s insinuations that she was not tough enough on defendants in child sexual abuse cases, Jackson has explained in detail how sentencing works, saying, “What a judge has to do is determine how to sentence defendants proportionately consistent with the elements that the statutes include, with the requirements Congress has set forward … Judges are doing the work of assessing in each case a number of factors that are set forward by Congress, all against the backdrop of heinous criminal behavior … and Congress has given judges factors to consider.”
      Jackson said she has to consider the facts and the recommendations of government and the probation department in sentencing, adding, “You’re questioning whether or not I take them seriously or if I have some reason to handle them in a different way than my peers or in a different way than other cases, but I assure you I do not.”
      Hawley said: “I am questioning your discretion and judgment.” He asked her why she was not tougher on an 18-year-old in a case involving child sexual abuse images.
      Jackson explained that she was following guidelines and responding to specific facts in the case, and sentenced him to three months in federal prison.

      5.31pm EDT

      17:31

      Josh Hawley, Republican senator from Missouri, started his questions with detailed descriptions of child sexual abuse cases and accusing Jackson of not being tough enough on offenders. Here’s the response from a White House spokesperson, saying Halwey’s remarks are “embarrassing” and a signal to QAnon conspiracy theorists:

      Andrew Bates
      (@AndrewJBates46)
      Hawley’s embarrassing, QAnon-signaling smear has been fact checked by: @washingtonpost, @nytimes, @AP, @CNN, @ABC, and @NRO:https://t.co/JDHAWH7l3dhttps://t.co/JbPnmE7lbIhttps://t.co/8DuoUg80hGhttps://t.co/fA4hUmeqGyhttps://t.co/fA4hUmeqGyhttps://t.co/UVCtmAImJ2

      March 22, 2022

      5.17pm EDT

      17:17

      Martin Pengelly

      Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, is now questioning Jackson. There was an interesting nugget from Punchbowl News this morning, on Hawley and why he is pressing his attack on the judge over her past sentencing of offenders convicted over child sexual abuse images. More

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson defends against Republican’s claims on child abuse sentences

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson defends against Republican’s claims on child abuse sentencesSupreme court nominee responds to Josh Hawley’s accusations, which have have been debunked as false, at Senate hearing

      Ketanji Brown Jackson faces questions on second day of confirmation hearings – live updates
      Ketanji Brown Jackson gave a passionate defense of her sentencing of child sexual abuse imagery offenders as a rebuttal to attacks from a Republican senator who has accused her of endangering children, as her confirmation hearings for a seat on the US supreme court entered a critical second day.Ketanji Brown Jackson vows to defend US constitution in opening remarksRead moreAt the start of an epic day of questioning before the Senate judiciary committee on Capitol Hill, Jackson strongly rejected claims made by Josh Hawley, Republican senator from Missouri.The senator has spent several days advancing the theory that the Biden nominee, in her eight years as a federal district court judge, handed down sentences that were far more lenient than federal guidelines suggested or prosecutors requested.Hawley’s accusations have been debunked as misleading and false. On Tuesday, Jackson gave a personal response to the claims.“As a mother and a judge who has had to deal with these cases, nothing could be further from the truth,” Jackson said under questioning from Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic committee chair.She said child abuse cases were among the most difficult she dealt with as a judge, and described child sexual abuse imagery as a “sickening and egregious crime”.On the second day of hearings, each committee member was given 30 minutes to engage with Jackson. On Wednesday, they will get 20 minutes for follow-up questions. The final decision on confirmation will be made in a vote of the full Senate that is likely to be held by the first week in April.After a relatively amicable opening day, Jackson was facing up to 12 hours on Tuesday of possibly grueling interrogation from the 22-member committee, half of which is Republican. If confirmed, Joe Biden’s nominee would become the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s highest court in its more than two centuries of existence.At Durbin’s invitation, Jackson defended herself against the Republican attack line that she was soft in her legal approach to terrorist suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay military camp in Cuba. Jackson spent two years as a federal public defender and in that role represented some of the detainees in their bid for review of their cases.Jackson pointed out that her brother, Ketajh Brown, joined the US military in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. But she went on to say that American justice required all defendants to be represented and treated fairly.“That’s what makes our system the best in the world, that’s what makes us exemplars,” she said.The committee also scrutinised amicus briefs filed by Jackson before the supreme court relating to Guantánamo. Lindsey Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina, focused on a brief that argued that detainees held there indefinitely as “enemy combatants” should either be put up for trial or released.Graham said that if her argument had been accepted by the court it would have damaged the US war on terrorism. “This is not how you run a war,” he said.Jackson replied that she had been conveying the views of the private groups and thinktanks that she had been representing, not her own opinions.Graham also tried to impugn Jackson by association, pointing to progressive groups who had backed her nomination. He especially referred to groups that wanted to dilute conservative dominance of the supreme court by expanding the number of its justices.“Every group that wants to pack the court, that believes this court is a bunch of rightwing nuts that is going to destroy America, that considers the constitution trash – all wanted you picked … That is problematic for me,” Graham said.The nominee was asked by the committee to lay out her views on abortion. The subject is currently before the supreme court which is expected to dismantle the fundamental right to a termination enshrined in its own 1973 ruling Roe v Wade.Jackson said that she agreed with two of Trump’s appointees to the court, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, when they said in their respective confirmation hearings that Roe was settled law. She added that she believed that stare decisis – the legal principle of sticking with the court’s past precedent – was “very important”.John Cornyn, Republican senator from Texas, tried to puncture the stare decisis argument that Roe should be respected as established precedent by invoking Dred Scott, the 1857 supreme court ruling that stripped people of African descent of US citizenship, and Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that approved racial segregation. “Thank goodness the supreme court has been willing to revisit its precedent, otherwise we’d still be living with Plessy and Dred Scott,” he said.Cornyn quizzed Jackson on her views about same-sex marriage and whether it was legitimate for the supreme court to have declared gay marriage legal in 2015. She said the court had decided that marriage equality was a right under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.Cornyn riposted that five unelected justices had created a new fundamental right ignoring the will of voters. “We five members of the supreme court are going to decide what the law of the land should be, and anyone who disagrees with me will be labeled a bigot.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsnewsReuse this content More