No showdown over KBJ?

No showdown over KBJ?

Recent Supreme Court nominee hearings have been box office Washington events. But there’s little to suggest that, when Ketanji Brown Jackson appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, the event will be anything but a low-key and temporary distraction from the war in Ukraine.

But the likelihood of a confirmation process that fails to capture much attention isn’t just a product of the enormity of what is happening elsewhere in the world. It’s also because, in Brown Jackson, the White House appears to have chosen a difficult-to-get-outraged-about jurist. Yes, she’s liberal (as you would expect), but she’s also steady, reasonable and consensus-oriented in disposition. Republicans do not have an agreed line on Jackson: some are attacking her for being out of touch, others for being soft on crime, but none are delivering the kind of stinging blows you might have expected. Perhaps that’s because few see much political upside in going all-in on their opposition to Jackson. One recent poll found that fewer than a quarter of voters want to see her blocked from filling the vacancy on the court.

An anonymous Republican told the Washington Post that “given the war in Ukraine, and the economic pain inflation and high gas prices are causing Americans, most people aren’t focused enough on Judge Jackson’s record [of] being soft on crime to tell if it’s resonating.”

One Daily Wire account of Jackson’s track-record accuses her of “nodding to the progressive idea of Critical Race Theory” by using the term “microaggression.” But the context in which it was used makes her sound eminently sensible: “Life is not fair, and I totally get that the microaggressions that you are observing are real,” she said in a 2019 speech to college students. “The question I am encouraging you to think about is whether being confrontational will actually solve the problem, and even more important, whether it is worth your time! Having a thick skin means recognizing when you’re being disrespected, but also understanding that marshaling a response each time something happens is a big distraction that takes your mind and attention away from what really matters, which is doing the best job that you can possibly do so that you can rise to a level in which you will actually be able to address the kinds of issues that you’ve witnessed.”

The most potent attacks so far have come from Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who this week previewed his line of attack: a series of sentencing decisions in child pornography cases that he thinks are worryingly lenient. “She’s had ten that I’ve seen that we’ve found and I haven’t found a single case where she’s sentenced — for child porn offenders — where she’s sentenced with the guidelines. Always below, and almost always below the government’s recommendations — in some cases dramatically below,” he said.

Hawley’s attack triggered an over-the-top White House reaction. White House press flack Andrew Bates labeled the criticisms “toxic and weakly presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context — and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny.” Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said in an interview with Politico that he was “troubled” by Hawley’s critique “because it’s so outrageous,” adding: “It really tests the committee as to whether we’re going to be respectful in the way we treat this nominee.” Of course, charges of “misinformation” only help Hawley, who is well within his rights to scrutinize the judicial track record of a Supreme Court nominee. And given the tone of hearings for recent GOP picks for the Supreme Court, Republicans on the committee will surely raise an eyebrow at Durbin’s call for respectfulness.

Expect the bitterness and bad-bloodedness that is par for the course in Washington, as well as strident questioning from the 2024 hopefuls on the committee (Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, as well as Hawley). But don’t expect the voters to pay much attention.

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DC’s bizarro St. Paddy’s Day

Washington needs a total and complete shutdown of all future St. Patrick’s Day revelry until we can figure out what the hell is going on. The US capital’s embrace of Irish culture is cringe-inducing at the best of times. But there was evidently something in the Jameson’s as Washington leaders celebrated Ireland’s patron saint yesterday.

“I may be Irish, but I’m not an idiot,” quipped president and notable plastic paddy, Joe Biden, getting things the wrong way round.

Biden, though, was outdone by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who introduced a Riverdance performance by reading a poem about the plight of the Ukrainian people sent to her by U2 frontman Bono. “Whether we’re in Ireland or here or wherever, Bono has been a very Irish part of our lives,” she said before sharing the verse:

O Saint Patrick, he drove out the snakes,
with his prayers, but that’s not all it takes
.…
Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And Saint Patrick’s name now Zelensky

If only more politicians took a leaf out of Eric Adams’s book. The New York Mayor celebrated in appropriate, unfussy fashion yesterday: with multiple Guinnesses over breakfast. The self-styled party mayor had made it to two Irish bars in Manhattan by noon.

Let he who is without crack-induced nudes cast the first stone

So reads the headline of Cockburn’s latest offering, which deals with yet more strange comments from the Commander-in-Chief. As my colleague reports:

With his trademark eloquence, Biden emphasized how the reauthorization took aim at revenge porn, which he described as “a new civil rights cause of action for those whose intimate images were shared on a public screen.”

“I bet everybody knows somebody,” the president explained, “that in an intimate relationship, what happened was the guy takes a revealing picture of his naked friend, or whatever, in a compromising position and then blackmails.”

What you should be reading today

Elle Gyges: Don’t cancel Russian culture
Bill Wirtz: Angela Merkel’s legacy crumbles
Dan Negrea: Make China pay for its quiet support of Putin’s war
Parker Richards, the New Republic: Make America good again
Julia Carpenter, Wall Street Journal: Americans are having an inflation aha moment
Joe Simonson and Matthew Foldi, Washington Free Beacon: Dem offices remain empty after Biden’s call for a return to normal

Poll watch

President Biden Job Approval
Approve: 41.5 percent
Disapprove: 53.5 percent
Net approval: -12.0 (RCP Average)

Proportion of voters who regard the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a major threat to US interests
Overall: 50 percent
Republicans: 51 percent
Democrats: 50 percent (Pew)

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