In an ideal world, Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation ordeal would go down as one of the most shameful moments in the history of SCOTUS confirmation hearings. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Furthermore, media has a far greater distance from the ideal and could in no good faith be called passably honest when analyzing these subjects.
Case in point, a recent editorial from the Washington Post in which they proclaimed that in contrast with what happened to Brett Kavanaugh, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has been treated “worse” during her hearings:
Republicans say they haven’t pulled a Kavanaugh. In fact, they’ve treated Ketanji Brown Jackson worse, the Editorial Board writes https://t.co/HS2NOlmeFT
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) March 24, 2022
They can’t believe that their assessments would be accurate in any alternate reality. Nevertheless, they give it their best shot, suggesting that questioning Jackson’s record on child sex predators, her work defending Gitmo detainees, and her associations with questionable organizations was much more shameful than being accused of being a serial rapist:
A woman has credibly accused Kavanaugh sexual assault. Democrats asked the committee to investigate. Republicans supported his nomination after a brief FBI investigation. The end result was that Mr. Kavanaugh behaved implacably, attacking Democratic senators personally and showing partisan instincts, raising questions about his impartiality.
Republicans on the contrary have accused Judge Jackson of being a friend of child pornographers based upon obvious distortions to her record and law. Others painted Judge Jackson as being a friend to child pornographers. Despite the fact that the sentences she wrote in her cases are consistent with the judicial mainstream, Mr. Graham and other critics of her portray her this way. Before the hearings, these allegations were debunked by even conservative outlets. The more Judge Jackson argued for rationality in criminal sentencing — or attempted to, as Mr. Graham continually interrupted her — the more Mr. Graham ranted about the evils of child pornography, which Judge Jackson had already condemned repeatedly and her record plainly shows she takes seriously.
A discerning reader will know that there was no such thing. Any “credible” accusations (not even one!) Kavanaugh was raped beyond what the pro-abortion Democrats of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and their hardcore followers on the left and in media had imagined.
Further, also of note is how the Washington Post apparently expects judicial nominees who are accused of being the ringleaders behind secret college gang rape cults that involved drugging women and raping their limp bodies to sit by quietly as a reputation they’ve worked decades to establish gets burned down by shamefully opportunistic political hacks for whom facts don’t matter.
You can best believe, however, that if Jackson had been accused of anything as remotely nefarious from her college years, if she had come out and defended herself in an aggressive manner similar to Kavanaugh’s, the WaPo would be “yaaas, qweening” her up one side and down the other.
The bottom line, or so the WaPo wants you to think, is that questioning from Republican Senators should be made “in good faith.” The problem, though, is that they never hold Democrats to this same standard. In fact, their ignoring of the abhorrent behavior displayed by Democrats during the Kavanaugh hearings (where, again, they falsely suggested the accusations were “credible”) pretty much proves the point.
It is not until we get to nearly the end of the editorial that the WaPo’s true motivations for writing what they did are confirmed:
Unfortunately, their colleagues’ antics distracted from their more productive questioning, and from what should have been the order of the day: We recognize the historic nomination by the First Black Woman to the Supreme Courtand to use the chance to ask difficult legal questions in good-fait
Zwei things. First, Judge Jackson does not serve on the Supreme Court Yet. And two, notice what order the Washington Post put the “order of the day” items in. Priority One for them was the “historic” nature of Jackson’s nomination. Newsflash: that shouldn’t even factor into the equation. The fact that the paper included that as a rationale for conducting hearings in “good faith” just goes to show that pretty much everything they wrote in it about using them gauge Jackson’s judicial philosophy was hot garbage.
Lastly, their only acknowledgment that Democrats engage in partisan politics during confirmation hearings came at the very end of the piece, and it was a very tepid condemnation, with them giving the lion’s share of the blame to Republicans:
The politicization that accompanied the confirmation process is not justifiable. The Republicans did the greatest damage, especially after they removed Judge Merrick Garland from office in 2016. They continue this path with their clownish shows by Graham and other comedians.
That viewpoint would be strongly opposed by Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, who were both former Supreme Court justices. Ironically, Bork’s nomination was viciously torpedoed by then-Sen. Joe Biden, who would eventually try to do the same thing with Thomas a few years later in what Thomas accurately described at the time as a “high-tech lynching.”
Conveniently, the WaPo has forgotten those disgraceful moments in America’s judicial confirmation history because they don’t line up with the bogus narratives about “clownish Republicans” they want you to swallow whole. And that, my dear readers, is just one more way “democracy dies in darkness.”
Related: Glenn Youngkin Gets Last Laugh After WaPo Issues ‘Clarification’ on Hit Piece That Fell Apart
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