It must be nice to be a Democrat.
Without any corroborating evidence whatsoever, and with all named alleged witnesses denying the incident ever happened, the broadcast networks unquestioningly attacked Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for weeks after known Democratic donor Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of rape on a never-identified day in 1982.
Fast forward to this past Wednesday, and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has laid out a firmly documented case that, starting in law school, through her time on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and as a federal judge, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson has been soft on child pornographers.
Did the broadcast networks even take any time to read Hawley’s well-documented case against Jackson?
It doesn’t appear so. Here is how George Stephanopoulos, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and now the host of ABC’s This Week, questioned Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin about Hawley’s facts this Sunday:
“In the face of these hearings, we are now seeing escalating attacks from Senate Republicans like Josh Hawley, who set out a Twitter — series of tweets suggesting that Judge Jackson somehow is soft on child porn. It’s been debunked by several independent fact-checkers. But what does that tell you about the confirmation fight ahead?”
Notice that his question assumes Sen. Hawley’s claims have been “debunked” without ever even mentioning what the specific claims are, let alone bothering to look at them objectively.
Sen. Durbin, of course, agreed with Stephanopoulos’s characterization, responding, “The independent fact-checkers like the Washington Post and CNN have discredited his claims already. They should have. There’s no truth to what he says.”
Notice that Sen. Durbin completely fails to identify what exactly that Sen. Hawley said is untrue. That’s because he can’t. Everything Sen. Hawley said about Judge Jackson’s record on child pornography is 100% true.
In his tweet thread, Sen. Hawley notes that in her role as a commissioner of the USSC, Judge Jackson said that some people who possess child pornography “are in this for either the collection, or the people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community.”
Now, it is 100% true that Judge Jackson said this. The Washington Post points out that when Judge Jackson said this, she was “just asking a follow-up question to a witness who had spoken of an online community.” Now, it is true that Judge Jackson was asking a question when she said this, but the transcript makes it clear she is friendly to the witness and obviously agrees with the witness’s conclusion.
More importantly, the final USSC report agreed to by Judge Jackson agreed with the witness’s testimony and recommended lowering the mandatory minimum sentence for child pornographers.
As a commissioner on the USSC, Judge Jackson had every right to believe that the mandatory minimum sentences for child pornographers are too harsh. But guess what? She is a judge, not a lawmaker, and it is Congress that sets mandatory minimum sentences for child pornographers, not the USSC. And after Judge Jackson agreed to the USSC report recommending that Congress lower mandatory minimum sentences for child pornographers, Congress ignored her recommendation.
Nothing that Sen. Hawley said about Judge Jackson’s record on child pornography was false in any way. Sen. Hawley and Congress just have a policy disagreement with Judge Jackson on the proper punishment for child pornography. That Congress disagrees with lenient federal judges on the relative harshness of criminal sentences is the entire reason mandatory minimums exist in the first place.
Stephanopoulos and Sen. Durbin can delay defending light sentences for child pornographers for a few more weeks. But Sen. Hawley, and many other Republicans, are going to question Judge Jackson about this issue during her hearing.
She needs to prepare a better answer than suggesting the Washington Post “debunked” Sen. Hawley.
