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

The judge is back in the hearing room. Up first after the break is senator Ben Sasse, a Republican of Nebraska, who begins by telling Jackson that she’s “51% “of the way to the finish line.

Acknowledging how grueling nominations can be, Sasse, in a moment of levity, told her: “These processes are a lot like a proctology exam.”

Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware who is known as a bipartisan broker, emphasized the broadness and diversity of the support for Jackson’s nomination. He touted letters of support from conservative lawyers and judges as well as support from the law enforcement groups, including the Fraternal Order of Police.

Reviewing her record, he said nothing suggests she would be an activist judge or that she was in any way swayed by partisanship or politics. At one point, he quoted the Republican National Committee, which has opposed Jackson’s nomination, claiming she was a “radical” who would be unable to set aside her personal beliefs to rule objectively. Coons then recalled a court case brought by the RNC in 2016, just before the party conventions, in which the Republican organization filed a lawsuit to obtain thousands of documents related to emails sent by Hillary Clinton, at the time the Democratic presidential nominee. Jackson sided with the RNC, and the documents were turned over, Coons explained.

When Coon finished, Durbin announced that the committee would take a brief break. This is expected to be the longest day of the four-day confirmation process.

In a contentious back and forth with Cruz, Jackson forcefully defended her sentencing decisions in cases involving offenders convicted of child sexual abuse.

Cruz brought a chart in which he calculated the difference between maximum sentencing guidelines and the sentence Jackson handed down, in an effort to make the case that she lenient on defendants of child sex crimes, a characterization she rejected. Responding carefully and pointedly, Jackson told Cruz: “Your chart does not include all of the factors,” namely the way in which Congress has told judges to consider sentences in such cases. As a mother and a judge, “I take these cases very seriously,” she said.

Speaking personally, she said the cases were awful to review. She said the evidence in such cases were some of the worst images she’s ever had to review.

“I sometimes still have nightmares” about a woman who she told the committee earlier “cannot leave her house” because of her victimization as a child, Jackson said.

Back to the Hart building, where senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas, is up. He appears to have posters. Cruz was Jackson’s law school classmate at Harvard, where he said they weren’t close but were cordial.

After exchanging niceties, he immediately dove into a culture war question about the 1619 project, which she mentioned in a speech she was asked to give on Martin Luther King Day. Jackson explained the context for the reference and said the project and is not relevant to her work.

Cruz pressed on, asking her to define critical race theory, an academic theory that has sparked conservative outrage in schools. He then held up a series of children’s books about antiracism that are suggested reading as part of the curriculum at Georgetown Day School, a liberal, private school in Washington, where she is a member of its board. Singling out Antiracist Baby, a children’s book by Ibram X Kendi, he tried to get Jackson to say that the school taught critical race theory.

In her first signs of exasperation thus far, she sighed before responding to Cruz that she does not believe children should be made to feel as if they are racist or an oppressor.

Jackson noted that there was a difference between the curriculums for private and public schools and that this was outside her purview as a member of the school’s board, and that none of this had any bearing on her record or jurisprudence.

Cruz’s line of questioning is a reminder that supreme court hearings offer ambitious senators a high-profile platform to score political points. The Texas senator ran for president in 2016 and has expressed interest in running again in 2024.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and a former prosecutor, asked Jackson a series of questions about voting rights, antitrust law, press freedom and waning public confidence in the court.

Jackson said public confidence in the supreme court is fundamental because that it is all it has to enforce its decision. She said she accepted Biden’s nomination in part because it would demonstrate to the public that the court works for and is reflective of all Americans.

I am here standing on the shoulders of generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity, from my grandparents who had just a grade-school education but instilled in my parents the importance of learning. And my parents, who I’ve mentioned here many times already, were the first in their families to go to college. So this nomination, against that backdrop, is significant to a lot of people and I hope that it will bring confidence, it will help inspire people to understand that our courts are like them, our judges are like them.

Earlier today, Psaki said that the president watched Jackson’s opening statement, and found it to be “strong, forceful and effective.”

Senator Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah and a lawyer who clerked for justice Samuel Alito, asked Jackson about how she decided sentences in cases involving child sexual abuse offenders.

Republicans have highlighted a handful of cases in which they say she handed down sentences below the maximum allowed by statue. She said earlier that these 10 cases do not reflect the full scope of her decisions and sentencing determinations.

“The guidelines are one factor,” she said. “The court is told you look at the guidelines, but you also look at the nature and circumstances of the offense, the history and characteristics of the offender.”

The nuance is unlikely to satisfy her critics, particularly Republican senator Josh Hawley who has yet to question her.

Lunch break. The committee is now taking a roughly half an hour break for lunch. Durbin asks that the senators return promptly at 1:30 to resume questioning. There are still 15 members who have yet to ask questions during the first round.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island and a longtime critic of the way undisclosed “dark” money shapes the judiciary, is up now. He is using his time to expand on his comments from yesterday, in which he said the current conservative supermajority on the supreme court was effectively underwritten by dark money groups such as the Federalist Society.

Those comments offended some Republicans, even as those same senators complained about the influence of much smaller and less organized progressive groups on Biden’s supreme court nomination.

Replete with posters, Whitehouse explained the way dark money influences the supreme court, apologizing for his digression, but stating that it was important to use the platform to demonstrate the shadowy financing that goes into a supreme court nomination.

He acknowledged that both parties use dark money to push their respective judicial nominees, but explained that there is a particularly powerful and well-financed operation among conservatives.

There is a drastic difference between rooting for somebody and controlling the turnstile that decides who gets on the court, controlling the funding of the political campaigns that pursue the folks on the court and actually once you get on the court … that same anonymous money appearing before the court through phony front groups that file amicus briefs in little flotillas or if it’s an important enough case, a full armada of dark money-funded front groups,” Whitehouse said.