It was clear during Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing Tuesday that she did not want to come across or sound like a leftist. She affirmed her support for the Constitution and the limits it places on the judiciary, vowed not to abuse her role and go outside of those limitations, and steered clear of a number of policies associated with the Left, such as critical race theory.
As my colleague Quin Hillyer wrote on Tuesday, Jackson sounded a bit like a conservative nominee — and that’s important insofar as it affirms the originalist judicial philosophy championed by many conservative judges over the years.
Many of her answers were sure to make leftist activists squirm: She said a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade would be “worthy of respect” because it would become the new precedent, that she does not believe a child should be taught that they are inherently racist or that they are either a victim or oppressor because of their skin color, and that police officers are necessary and admirable figures in our society.
But the real question is whether Jackson believes anything she has said. Unfortunately, we have reason to believe she doesn’t.
On the topic of critical race theory, for example, Jackson denied that she has “studied” its teachings — a wholly unbelievable claim considering she praised one of the founders of CRT, Derrick Bell, in a recent speech and referenced several of CRT’s core concepts, including intersectionality and equity. Bell was even a professor at Harvard Law School while Jackson was an undergraduate student at Harvard University. And we’re to believe she’s not familiar with his work?
Jackson’s response to a different question posed by Sen. Marsha Blackburn was just as stupefying. Blackburn asked her, quite simply, to “provide a definition for the word ‘woman.’” Jackson’s answer was: “I can’t. … I’m not a biologist.”
All that Jackson had to say was: “Me — I’m a woman.” But she refused to answer, probably because she knew that giving an honest and straightforward response about the biological reality that defines sex would be a step too far for the gender ideologues that make up the Democratic Party.
This raises some important questions: Does Jackson care more about the prescribed tenets of leftism than the truth? And to what extent will she allow those beliefs to influence her rulings?
These questions are not at all irrelevant. Part of Jackson’s job as a Supreme Court justice would be to deal directly with laws regarding sex and discrimination on the basis of gender. How she thinks about sex and gender, and whether she believes sex is an indisputable biological fact or an open-ended construct, will directly affect the court’s rulings on these laws, which will, in turn, affect the millions of people governed by them.
Jackson has heretofore avoided describing her judicial philosophy, referring senators to her “methodology,” or the process by which she makes decisions, instead. (And, yes, there is a difference.) But we were able to catch a glimpse at the way she thinks about the law — and the principles she takes into account when looking at the law. And that glimpse suggests her views are much more radical than she’s letting on.
