The White House dismissed it with a joke. A National Review columnist called it a “smear.” And the paid media campaigns against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court have ignored it completely.
And yet, on Tuesday morning, the first accusation Jackson was asked to respond to was the one first made by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — that she had given sexual predators and people caught with child pornography the most “lenient” sentences she possibly could.
“These are some of the most difficult cases that a judge has to deal with,” Jackson said. “The statute doesn’t say, ‘look only at the guidelines and stop.’ The statute doesn’t say, ‘impose the highest possible penalty for this sickening and egregious crime.’”
Republicans haven’t settled on the best way to use this month’s hearings to damage Democrats, or to stop Jackson from becoming the first Black woman to serve on the highest court.
But Hawley’s focus on sentencing requirements for child sex offenders comes straight from campaign trail, where cracking down on sexual predators and pornographers is a guaranteed winnerin general elections, especially in law enforcement and judicial races— even when there’s criticism of stings that capture people with no criminal records.
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The criticism of Jackson has three components: She wrote a 1996 article on whether it was constitutional to retroactively add sex offenders to a registry, she gave convicts less onerous sentences than the sentencing guidelines allowed, and that her own stance on the guidelines deserves investigation.
“This is a 25-year pet project for Judge Jackson, and it is very, very alarming,” Mike Davis, the founder of the conservative Article III Project, said on a conservative podcast shortly before the hearing. “Of all the issues that she could have taken on in law school, as a sentencing commissioner where she’s setting policy, as a district court judge — why is going easier on people who possess child pornography one of her pet issues?”
When voters have gotten their say, judges seen as stopping short of the sentencing guidelines have landed in political trouble. Emily Horowitz, an academic who’s written critically of pumped-up sex offender laws, pointed to the fate of Aaron Persky, a California judge who handed down a six-month prison sentence in a college rape case, and was recalled by voters within months.
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