Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s first Supreme Court nominee, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the first of her confirmation hearings. The first Black woman to be nominated to the court, she will if confirmed replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.
With the Democrats in control of the Senate and the court now heavily tilted in conservatives’ favour, Ms Brown Jackson – currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia – is expected to be confirmed barring some unforseen event.
However, some Republicans have lately begun attacking her for her past work as a public defender, focusing in particular on her work defending sexual offenders. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, yesterday questioned her aggressively about supposedly lenient sentences she handed down to certain child sexual offenders.
The White House condemned his line of questioning – which is based on largely debunked misrepresentations of the decisions in question – calling it an ‘embarrassing, QAnon-signalling smear’ in reference to the conspiracy theory that the world is run by a cabal of cannibalistic paedophiles.
