With three Republican senators breaking ranks to commit to voting to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the controversial judge appears to be on a glide path to becoming the first black woman seated on the high bench. But the scandal of the White House allegedly covering up her judicial record, including the withholding of tens of thousands of pages of documents from Senate investigators, will outlast her appointment.
Senate sources say it sets a dangerous precedent for vetting future lifetime appointments.
For instance, the White House left the child-pornography distribution case of a schoolteacher, Lucas William Cane, out of materials it sent to the Judiciary Committee before last week’s confirmation hearings. Cane’s was one of the more heinous cases of child porn that Jackson heard as a federal trial judge on the D.C. bench from 2013 to 2021.
His May 2021 sentencing also was one of the last cases that came before her bench, making it even more politically radioactive.
The sources say the White House withheld the case files from the committee staff vetting Jackson because they simultaneously shattered two key talking points in defense of the judge—one, that she followed the recommendations of probation officers, and two, that she was “well within the mainstream” among other judges for sentencing child porn offenders.
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“Jackson is by far the most extreme judge on child porn,” said Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a Washington advocacy group for constitutional judges and the rule of law. “Their [the White House and committee Democrats] ‘everybody’s-doing-it’ argument is nonsense.”
The White House and Democrats have also complained that Republicans are citing one-off cases or “cherry-picking” Jackson’s record. But Davis’s group has analyzed the totality of her child porn cases.
“When she had discretion in sentencing, Judge Jackson always sentenced these monsters to significantly less time than what the federal guidelines recommended—47 percent below the national average for possession and 57 percent below the national average for distribution,” said Davis, who previously served as chief Senate Judiciary counsel for nominations.
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