Coverage of Judiciary Committee Behavior Pans Future GOP Also-Rans
“Condescending.” “Truly Bizarre.” “Hallucinatory.” 2024 future GOP presidential contenders in the Senate were tripping over themselves to attack Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson – but the reviews are in, and they’re not good, folks! But don’t take our word for it – check out the coverage below.
“Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton’s performance this week was so poorly acted and overproduced, I can only guess that Tom Hooper is recasting Cats,” said Drew Godinich, American Bridge spokesperson. “The behavior of these sad men hoping to vie for the 2024 GOP nomination is shameful – and perhaps belongs on the set of Gigli, but not in the United States Senate, nor the White House.
Read the coverage:
Cotton
CNN: “Blunt and somewhat condescending, Cotton posed a series of questions about whether police should arrest more criminals and whether sentences for those convicted should be longer.”
CNN: “Cotton, a graduate of Harvard Law School, would have been aware that many of these questions were policy orientated and beyond a judge’s purview. But he now has TV footage he can use in a political context to argue that Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court couldn’t say whether murderers should stay longer in jail.”
Esquire: “Senator Tom Cotton treated those cursed to be watching Supreme Court nomination hearings on a Tuesday evening to a truly bizarre exhibition.”
Esquire: “Cotton got the law-and-order angle, which he seemed to take as permission to slip into a hallucinatory event where Judge Jackson was actually being nominated to serve as attorney general.”
Cruz
New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore: “Ted Cruz Outdid Himself in the Jerkiness Department”
Slate: “Cruz also spent significant time on ‘critical race theory,’ distorting aspects of the judge’s record in a way that turned the hearing into a culture-war spectacle.”
Daily Beast: “But facts don’t matter to the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ Republicans. Sen. Cruz used his bully pulpit at the nationally televised hearings to smear the eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee as a radical, anti-white racist.”
Esquire: “Leave it to Senator Ted Cruz to turn a discussion of children’s books into a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time.”
Hawley
Vanity Fair: “Senator Josh Hawley has doubled down on his smear of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson—one that seemingly echoes conspiracies spread by QAnon—accusing Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee of being soft on child pornography cases.”
CNN: “The overtly political nature of the questioning was underscored on Wednesday when Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who cross-examined Jackson the day before with misleading claims that she was out of the mainstream of judges on the sentencing of child porn offenders, gladly embraced White House criticism of his conduct to trigger a public political showdown.”
MSNBC’s Joyce Vance: “The most disingenuous line of questioning came from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a Yale educated lawyer, who seemed determined to fault Jackson for what he deemed unfairly low sentences in child pornography cases.”
Insider: “Hawley’s assertions about Brown’s rulings on those cases have been largely debunked. Still, it’s an issue that energizes conservative voters; combating child sex trafficking has become a rallying cry partly because of conspiracy theories amplified by QAnon and its adherents.”
ABC News: “Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is sticking with his line of attack on Jackson’s sentencing of child-pornography offenders despite fact-checks pointing out that he has voted to confirm other federal judges who similarly veered from sentencing guidelines.”
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Published: Mar 25, 2022 | Last Modified: Apr 1, 2022