falsely saying she was soft on sex offenders to begin with....and for providing protection for people in detention at Guantanamo.....
Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson are set to begin Monday, and Republicans are already signaling their plan to attack her for providing legal representation to people imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. In doing so, lawmakers are revealing a belief that certain people don’t deserve a quality legal defense — undermining a key pillar of the U.S. judicial system.
The GOP concedes that in her role as a Washington, D.C., public defender, Jackson did not choose her clients, but nonetheless accuses her of being too enthusiastic in their defense. “Jackson’s advocacy for these terrorists was ’
zealous,’ going beyond just giving them a competent defense,” the Republican National Committee
says on its website in a takedown of Jackson.
n a
thinly sourced Twitter thread on Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) made a series of inflammatory attacks against Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court and currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The tweets dealt with some of Jackson’s past statements on sex offender registries and civil commitment, as well as her views on mandatory minimums. He claimed, without evidence, that Jackson “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker.”
It was a preview of a tactic Republicans will likely deploy next week when Jackson testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Hawley is a member. But despite his claim that she is soft on sex offenses, nothing is particularly unusual about her judgments in such cases.
“I’m concerned that this is a record that endangers our children,” Hawley tweeted Thursday, in a thread that contained out-of-context screenshots of Jackson’s past statements and no links to the underlying material he was criticizing.
Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record on cases involving sex offenses is backed by research well within the mainstream.
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