Republicans turned the second day of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing into an absolute farce on Wednesday.
Texas Republican Ted Cruz took a leading role in making the confirmation hearing into a political circus, nose-diving the hearing into buffoonery.
Cruz turned to theatrics, bringing up an outsized blow-up of a children’s book, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi. He pointed to a cartoon from its pages, which features a baby in diapers taking their first walk, and asked Jackson “Do you agree with this book… that babies are racist?”
Jackson signed and said “Senator,” then paused for a full seven seconds.
This came amid 13 hours of questioning on the second day, following more than 12 hours of questioning on the first day.
Jackson, who has a decade’s experience as a federal judge, and would become the first Black woman to ever sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, was being asked ridiculous questions like whether a baby was a racist.
Jackson replied saying she does not believe any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or not valued, or that they are victims or oppressors. Cruz refused to drop the subject. Jackson said that she has not reviewed these books as they do not come up in her work as a federal judge.
Cruz grilled Jackson almost exclusively on racially charged subjects. Critical race theory was a big button issue for him, and he felt free to declare he has anti-racist credentials by expressing that he admires Martin Luther King.
Cruz did not act alone in melting the hearing into a circus. Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham flounced out of the hearing after earlier wrongly accusing Jackson of calling George W Bush and the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld “war criminals.”
Republican Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, a controversial figure in the Senate and a proud defender of disinformation and conspiracy theories, asked Jackson whether she could provide a definition of the word woman.
Republican Senators Josh Hawley, Cruz, and Graham all channeled a QAnon conspiracy theory, insinuating that Jackson had been unduly lenient as a federal district court judge in the sentencing of sex offenders. T
All of this flew in the face of a promise delivered by Senator Chuck Grassley, who is the top Republican in the judiciary committee. At the start of the hearings, Grassley said there would be no “spectacle” or “political circus” coming from the Republican side.
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