The Supreme Court confirmation proceedings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh nearly blew up the Beltway. In contrast, those of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson have proven an absolute snoozefest.
Perhaps that’s partly because her departure will not change the court’s lean. She would replace the retiring liberal Justice Stephen Breyer. Ahead of the fight, the party leadership of both sides of the deadlocked Senate seemed content to disarm into a detente.
That hasn’t stopped the media from laughably claiming — in the case of the Washington Post editorial board, anyway — that Republicans treated Jackson “worse” than Democrats treated Kavanaugh when they accused him of being a serial gang rapist and sexual assailant based on no real evidence. Even more astounding was how the rest of the press ran with Democrats’ absurd proclamation that the GOP’s line of questioning about Jackson’s leniency toward child pornography convicts somehow plays into the hands of crazed conspiracy theorists.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of QAnon — you’re in the same boat as two-thirds of adults polled by Morning Consult. This crazed and baseless conspiracy theory involved a child sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza joint. It was just a stupid lie. It has absolutely nothing — nothing — to do with the actual, truly existing people convicted of child pornography, toward whom Republicans accuse Jackson of showing inappropriate leniency.
It’s no mystery what Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are doing. If there’s anything that will resonate with voters, even the lowest information voters, it is the justice system failing to punish properly child pornography offenders already convicted in criminal court.
Considering Congress’s unwillingness to modify sentencing guidelines on this front and Jackson operating within the average in her sentencing of these crimes, perhaps the attack wasn’t completely fair. But was it some conspiratorial QAnon slur? Not at all.
“This is about appealing to the QAnon audience,” said CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, the legal analyst famous for masturbating on camera during a Zoom call with his colleagues at the New Yorker. “This cult that is a big presence is Republican Party politics now where Sen. Hawley is trying to ingratiate himself and run for president with their support.”
“If you were wondering why Republican senators sounded like QAnon obsessives in the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, it is because, apparently, that is exactly the constituency they are catering to,” said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. Insider even accused committee Republicans of fueling QAnon by calling upon a top official from Operation Underground Railroad, an organization that combats real-life sex trafficking, as a hearing witness.
Pointing out that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell partied with two of our presidents and plenty of members of our press was not related to QAnon. Investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop, now long-belatedly authenticated by the New York Times, is not about QAnon.
And asking about a federal judge’s sentencing decisions in child pornography cases, however unfair or unhelpful, is not QAnon. But then again, maybe some in the media consider the conspiracy theories to be worse than the actual crimes against children.
