Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has the resume of a Supreme Court justice, as senators on both sides of the political aisle have pointed out. But her qualifications should not guarantee her a spot on the bench, especially since they are littered with red flags.
Here are three things senators should take into consideration before voting to support Jackson’s nomination:
First is her record on sex-offense cases, as Sen. Josh Hawley pointed out this week. In nearly a dozen child pornography cases, Jackson chose to ignore the government’s sentencing recommendations while on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and hand down lenient sentences instead. For example, in United States v. Hawkins, the government recommended sentencing a man who had “multiple images of child porn” to up to 10 years in prison. Jackson gave him only three months in prison, Hawley said.
Past comments made by Jackson confirm this lax sentencing was not a coincidence. While on the Sentencing Commission, Jackson seemed to downplay the possession of child pornography, claiming the criminals who seek it out do so “for either the collection, or the people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community.” And in law school, Jackson questioned the justice system’s treatment of sex offenders, arguing that courts should take into consideration the “climate of fear, hatred, and revenge associated with the release of convicted sex criminals.”
Hopefully, Hawley isn’t the only senator who finds this pattern disturbing.
Second is Jackson’s admiration for critical race theory founder Derrick Bell. During a lecture to the University of Michigan Law School in 2020, Jackson cited Bell as one of her heroes and said her parents had his book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, on their coffee table while she was growing up and that she has thought about it often since then. The book claims nonminority Americans force black Americans to stay at the bottom of society and speculates about a hypothetical in which the United States sells its black citizens to space aliens in exchange for gold to pay off the national debt. Bell also claimed slavery was not just “an example of what white America has done,” but a “constant reminder of what white Americans might do.”
In the same speech, Jackson also quoted the New York Times’s ahistorical 1619 Project.
And just last year, during a Harvard Alumni Association webinar with university President Larry Bacon, Jackson pressed Bacon on a number of topics related to its commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” including how Harvard “recruits and retains talented faculty of color,” and why it halted a “Latinx Studies” graduate course, according to the Daily Wire.
Finally, lawmakers should not ignore the fact that Jackson was the favorite of a number of far-left dark money groups, such as Demand Justice, that proudly favor court-packing. In fact, most of the organizations that threw their support behind Jackson’s nomination have supported adding seats to the bench for the sole purpose of eliminating the court’s conservative majority. Senators should find out exactly what Jackson thinks about this plan and spike her nomination right away if she does not emphatically condemn leftist attempts to undermine the integrity of the court.
Jackson’s record demands close scrutiny because, right now, it doesn’t appear to pass muster — no matter how qualified she appears to be.
Kaylee McGhee White is the deputy editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
