By trashing Jackson, the GOP magnified a right-wing court’s legitimacy problem

By trashing Jackson, the GOP magnified a right-wing court’s legitimacy problem

E.J. Dionne Jr. — Read time: 4 minutes

Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EDT

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) questions Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on the second day of her confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on March 22. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

By choosing the low road and smearing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson with false charges and vile innuendo, conservative Republicans did more than engage in self-besmirching behavior. They also missed an opportunity to advance what should have been their larger purposes. They will come to regret their choice.

President Biden nominated an exceptionally qualified and engaging jurist who is poised to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Republicans had an opportunity to address two problems at once — at no cost to their overall objective of turning the U.S. Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for conservative ideology.

By offering Jackson at least a respectful hearing, Republican senators could have taken a step toward easing the legitimacy crisis the Supreme Court confronts because of the GOP’s relentless packing of the nation’s highest judicial body. Rejecting extreme partisanship might have lowered the political temperature around the court, to the benefit of its 6-to-3 conservative majority.

And by avoiding the racial tropes they trotted out — denunciations of critical race theory, which Jackson has never embraced, and talk from Sen. Ted. Cruz (R-Tex.) about books teaching that “babies are racist” — the Republicans could have shown they mean what they say about judging people by “the content of their character.” Momentarily at least, they might have backed the party away from backlash politics.

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There would have been no cost to any of this because Jackson’s confirmation, now nearly assured with her endorsement on Friday from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), will not change the balance on the court at all. She is replacing another liberal (and one of her mentors), Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

Alas, as Carl Hulse, the New York Times’s veteran Washington correspondent dryly observed, “Republicans could not help themselves.”

What happened last week was not just politics as usual. The relentless attack on Jackson’s sentencing in child pornography cases was despicable. By sheer force of repetition, amplified by conservative media, an obviously brilliant jurist and devoted mother will forever be branded in the minds of some Americans as “soft on child porn.”

It’s revolting because, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler showed in a meticulous fact check, the claim by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) that Jackson “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook” amounted to “twisting the judge’s record.” It’s contemptible because as Linda Qiu reported in the New York Times, “all of the Republican critics” of Jackson “had previously voted to confirm judges who had given out prison terms below prosecutor recommendations” on child sex abuse crimes. The words “double standard” don’t begin to capture what’s going on here.

And it’s truly astonishing (though, alas, not surprising) that Cruz pressed Jackson on the racial content of children’s books that he said were taught at Georgetown Day School, where she serves on the Board of Trustees. Kudos to Jackson for telling Cruz of the books: “They don’t come up in my work as a judge which I am, respectfully, here to address.” The word “respectfully” did a lot of nice work in that sentence.

To turn the nomination of the first Black woman to the court into an occasion for raising racial themes Republicans plan to use in the 2022 and 2024 election campaigns was to kick away the chance the party had to show that it means what it says in declaring its faithfulness to “colorblindness.”

Of course there were Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, notably Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who approached their task thoughtfully. But even the admirably gracious Sasse announced Friday that while Jackson was “an extraordinary person,” he would have to vote against her because “we disagree on judicial philosophy.” The clear message: The GOP wants to keep even “extraordinary” liberals off the court.

What conservatives don’t want to acknowledge is how much damage they have already done by taking control of the court through the raw exercise of political power. Beginning with the blockade of Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016 and culminating in the rushed confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 election, Republicans have sent the message that not the law, not deliberation, but partisan manipulation is at the heart of the court’s decision-making.

The court’s conservative justices have reinforced this view with rulings on voting rights, gerrymanders and campaign finance that are tilted to the benefit of Republicans, moneyed interests and voter suppression. If the six-justice majority continues with its habits of overreach, precedent-breaking and indifference to the will of Congress, it will only harden the view that it is exercising arbitrary authority on behalf of a predetermined agenda.

A showdown seems inevitable. But Senate Republicans might have bought some time and eased the antagonism had they treated Jackson’s nomination as something other than an opportunity for mean-spirited political messaging.