Josh Hawley goes after Biden Supreme Court pick for record on sex offenders

Comments suggest tough path ahead for bipartisan confirmation of first Black woman to the Court

A right-wing senator whose support of the protesters who subsequently attacked the Capitol last year – and who became the stuff of headlines and furious editorials – is now speaking out against the judicial record of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

Josh Hawley delivered his criticism of Ms Jackson in a lengthy Twitter thread published on 16 March, in which he questioned a series of statements she had made in various points of her career, including her time in law school as well as at the US Sentencing Commission.

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Mr Hawley focused his fire on the judge’s writings about child pornography and paedophilia, and highlighted discussions in which Ms Jackson had taken part where she questioned sentencing guidelines for those accused of possessing such images or videos. The senator from Missouri in particular pointed to one decision Ms Jackson had made from the bench in which she gave a convicted possessor of child pornography a drastically lower sentence than what had been suggested under sentencing guidelines.

“Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker. She’s been advocating for it since law school. This goes beyond ‘soft on crime’. I’m concerned that this a record that endangers our children,” he wrote.

In the numerous examples Mr Hawley cited, the images of Ms Jackson’s quotations did not include any context regarding her remarks. Nor was context given for the several cases the senator referenced in which Ms Jackson purportedly gave sex offenders lower sentences than were suggested. Information about the cases he mentioned could not immediately be located.

In United States v. Stewart, the criminal possessed thousands of images of child porn and also hoped to travel across state lines to abuse a 9-year-old girl. The Guidelines called for a sentence of 97-121 months. Judge Jackson sentenced the criminal to just 57 months.

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) March 16, 2022

His comments have yet to be echoed publicly by many Republican senators, but there are murmurs of Republicans formulating a campaign of opposition to her nomination on the grounds of supposedly being “soft on crime”.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told his fellow senators on the chamber floor that “the soft on crime brigade is squarely in Judge Jackson’s corner” earlier this week, and the Republican National Committee has reportedly attacked her past work as a public defender representing detainees at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention facility in a background paper to Republican senators.

Because of rules in the Senate changed by Mr McConnell early on during the Trump administration, Democrats can confirm Ms Jackson to the bench without a single GOP vote should their entire Senate caucus be unified on her nomination. Still, the White House has expressed confidence that Ms Jackson’s nomination will appeal to Republicans as well.

A handful of key swing vote Republican senators including Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins have yet to indicate how their votes on Ms Jackson’s nomination will go, but that’s expected to change very soon as her Senate confirmation hearings are set to begin next week.