“…Instead of being about the court, or even Jackson,
Republicans are using the current hearings as free campaign ads to push their
kultur kampf narratives. The focus on imaginary kids is intended to spark moral
panic in conservative, middle-class white parents — a brazen appeal to the
base.
“This highly cynical strategy is hardly new, but it has
found fearsome purchase in the Trumpified Republican Party, co-constituted by
well-funded right-wing think tanks, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and organized
and disorganized white supremacists, represented by craven bad-faith and rabid
true-believer politicians.
“In other words, the obscene questioning of Jackson —
nodding to extremists, devoid of any attachment to reality, aimed only at
stockpiling power exclusively for the same old, sad sack white men — is the
bread and butter of today’s Republican Party.
“That the Republican Party has placed these
imaginary white children at its ideological center would be disturbing enough
as just a naked political ploy. That there are living, breathing
children — often nonwhite and non-cis — who become the victims of
this focus pushes it into the realm of the calamitous.
“Consider the hundreds of bills
moving swiftly through
Republican-led statehouses aiming to make the lives of trans children unlivable; the increasing
use of ‘grooming’ as a buzzword to describe those adults who would affirm and
support trans kids; the abundant successful local legislation that bans teaching the realities of racism and
thus ensures that the white supremacist status quo continues; and, of course,
the successful attacks on our reproductive rights in
the name of nonexistent babies…”
-Natasha Lennard, The Intercept
From NYT:
ReplyDeleteRepublicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have spent the last week smearing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, as indifferent to (and soft on) child sexual abuse.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri began the attack last week with a lengthy thread on Twitter, accusing Jackson of showing undue leniency toward child pornographers while serving as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. “I think we just have a basic question to ask,” Hawley told Fox News. “Are we gonna get a judge here who’s gonna protect children, or who’s gonna protect child predators?
Senator Mike Lee of Utah joined his colleague in attempting to tie Jackson to child pornographers. “The White House’s whataboutist response to Judge Jackson’s very real record in child pornography cases is dismissive, dangerous and offensive,” he said on Twitter “We need real answers.”
Hawley and Lee followed through on their promise to get “answers” from Jackson, taking every available opportunity to paint the judge — who would be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court — as overly lenient toward, if not somehow sympathetic to, child pornographers and other sexual predators. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas joined in.
“Judge Jackson, like so many far left activists, thinks that mandatory minimums for drug crimes are too harsh, just like she apparently thinks that mandatory minimums for child pornography are too harsh,” Cotton told Laura Ingraham. “She consistently sentences on the lowest end of the sentencing guidelines or even deviates downward from the sentencing guidelines. That’s what we’ve seen over the last two days examining her record — she is a far left activist who always — almost always — finds a way to sympathize with the criminals, not with the victims.”
“Every judge who does what you are doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited,” Graham said.
From NYT:
ReplyDeleteThese attacks are nonsense, a willful twisting of the facts. What those facts show is that Jackson is no more lenient than her colleagues in the federal judiciary when it comes to sentencing for “nonproduction” child pornography crimes, meaning crimes where the offender views or distributes material but does not produce it. As the legal scholar Douglas A. Berman wrote in response to Hawley, Judge Jackson’s sentencing decisions placed her in the “mainstream” of federal judges. Her record, he writes, “does show she is quite skeptical of the ranges set by the guidelines, but so too were prosecutors in the majority of her cases and so too are district judges nationwide (appointed by presidents of both parties).”
This attack is so spurious and dishonest that National Review denounced it as “meritless to the point of demagoguery.”
Of course, “demagoguery” is the point. It’s no accident that Republicans have landed on this particular accusation. The belief that Democrats are pedophiles — and that at its top levels the Democratic Party is an elaborate pedophilia ring — looms large in the QAnon conspiracy theory, which is something like orthodoxy for a substantial portion of the Republican base. In a poll taken just before the 2020 election, half of Donald Trump supporters agreed that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.” And in a poll taken last year by the Public Religion Research Institute, 15 percent of Americans say that “the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
The Republican attacks on Jackson are a QAnon dogwhistle, and QAnon followers have heard the message. In a recent piece, my newsroom colleagues David D. Kirkpatrick and Stuart A. Thompson describe how “the online world of adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory sprang into action almost as soon as Senator Josh Hawley tweeted his alarm.” On forums and in videos, QAnon supporters have blasted Judge Jackson as “an apologist for child molesters” and a “pedophile-enabler.”
Where the Republican base goes, the politicians follow. That was true with the Tea Party, it was true with Trump, and now it is true with QAnon. Indeed, it is already the case that one of the most high-profile and sought-after politicians within the Republican Party, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, is a QAnon influencer. For Hawley, Cotton and Cruz, whose presidential ambitions were clear from the moment they entered office, playing the QAnon game is a no-brainer.
It is also a travesty, a wicked and immoral use of the power of public office. Of course, neither wickedness nor immorality are, or have ever been, obstacles to political power. If they were then, well, we wouldn’t be living in this world.
-Jamelle Bouie