WASHINGTON — Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn ripped Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, tying the nominee to a wide variety of conservative grievances. But the lawmakers’ allegations often turned out to be based on out of context quotes. Here’s a closer look at some of her apparent sources.
Blackburn linked Jackson to the controversy over transgender athletes and women’s sports.
Ms. Blackburn portrayed the progressive push for transgender rights as excessive, dismissing a recent NCAA swim championship win by a transgender female athlete. She also stated that “educators allow biological men to steal opportunities from female athletes in the name of progressivism.”
The senator did not point to anything specific Judge Jackson has said or ruled about transgender athletes. But a few sentences later, she claimed to be quoting Judge Jackson in a way that used similar catchphrases — praising “the transformative power of progressive education.”
The senator didn’t say where that quote came from. But she seemed to manipulate a bit and take a quote from a profile in a magazine for Georgetown Day School, a liberal-oriented private school in Washington, after the judge joined the board.
Judge Jackson did not mention transgender female athletes in the article. Instead, she said that since enrolling a child there, she “witnessed the transformative power of a rigorous progressive education aimed at fostering critical thinking, independence and social justice.”
Blackburn suggested that Jackson trample on parental rights.
The senator said Judge Jackson is on the board of a school that tells preschoolers “that they can choose their gender and teaches them about so-called white privilege.” The school, the senator said, “is pushing an anti-racist education program for white families.” (A Georgetown Day School spokeswoman did not return a request for comment on this description.)
The senator accused Judge Jackson of condoning “progressive indoctrination” and said it raised concerns about how she might decide cases about parents’ right to control their children’s upbringing.
The issue of parental rights in education was a focus of the 2021 campaign for governor in Virginia, which a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, won. But that debate involved public schools, rather than private schools that parents can choose.
Blackburn accused Jackson of trying to put dangerous criminals out on the street.
The senator accused Judge Jackson of “consistently calling for more freedom for hardened criminals,” citing the senator that she “pled “at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic” that “every criminal defendant in the DC Department of Corrections custody should be released.”
Judge Jackson wrote in an April 2020 advisory that the increased risk of harm the pandemic caused to people confined in tight spaces “suggests” that “every and every” detainee should be released from incarceration.
But those words ran into an opinion in which she refused to release a man because the facts of his case showed he was dangerous. She cited legal restrictions on court-ordered releases that, she explained, stem from the recognition that releasing dangerous people poses significant risks to others.
Ms. Blackburn also described three cases where Judge Jackson ordered the release of prisoners, including “a convict who murdered an American Marshal”.
The cases appeared to match three Covid-era court rulings under a compassionate release law. The senator left out the context: For example, the man who killed a US Marshal did so in 1971, had served 49 years since then, and was 72 at the time of his release, with numerous health problems.
Blackburn accused Jackson of saying that every judge has a hidden agenda.
Ms. Blackburn said Judge Jackson “once wrote that every judge has personal hidden agendas, and I quote, personal hidden agendas, that affect how they decide cases.” The lawmaker suggested that the judge may have a hidden agenda to get violent criminals, police killers and child predators back on the streets.
That quote came from Judge Jackson’s thesis, which criticized the plea bargaining system.
But the future judge did not write that “every judge” has a hidden agenda. As part of a discussion about how lawyers and judges might choose plea deals to save the effort of a trial, she wrote, “Before we can analyze plea negotiations effectively, we must try to identify the personal hidden agendas of various court professionals.”
Blackburn said Jackson praised the 1619 project.
The senator accused Judge Jackson of praising the 1619 Project, a 2019 collection of essays in DailyExpertNews Magazine that described itself as attempting to “reframe the history of the country through the effects of slavery and the contributions of black Americans in the center of our national story.” Many conservatives denounce the project, which the senator portrayed as arguing that America is fundamentally racist.
In 2020, Judge Jackson gave a speech on black women leaders in the civil rights movement. A 27-page transcript contains two paragraphs in which she described the “provocative” thesis of the 1619 project as saying that America in 1776 was not perfect and that “it was really only because of the hard work, struggles and sacrifices of Afro-Americans. Americans over the past two centuries that the United States has finally become the free nation that its drafters initially praised.”
Blackburn said Jackson believes judges should use “critical race theory” when convicting criminals.
Ms. Blackburn said Judge Jackson had “made it clear that you think judges should consider critical race theory when deciding on criminal suspects.”
“Critical race theory” is a malleable term. It originally described a field in law schools that argued that laws and institutions can contain structural racial bias. More recently, it has become a catchphrase in culture war discourse, used primarily by conservatives to refer disparagingly to topics like white privilege.
Ms. Blackburn’s accusation appeared to refer to a line in a speech Judge Jackson gave about federal criminal sentencing policy. But whatever critical race theory means, the judge described why she finds the subject “fascinating,” not prescribing what judges should consider when pronouncing individual sentences.
“Conviction is just interesting on an intellectual level, in part because it melds countless kinds of law — criminal law, of course, but also administrative law, constitutional law, critical race theory, negotiations, and to some extent even contracts,” Judge Jackson said. She also mentioned the subject’s links to philosophy, psychology, history, statistics, economics, and politics.