The answers “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” sometimes are the right answers. Admitting that you don’t have a particular answer and/or fail to remember a certain instance from the past literally happens to the best of us.
But when a nominee for the highest court of law in the United States uses excuses like those over and over while testifying before the US Senate Judicial Committee, those mantras wear rather thin rather quickly.
After a while, “The dog ate my homework” excuse simply doesn’t flush.
That’s pretty much what happened today on Capitol Hill at the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearing.
I won’t give a blow-by-blow account, but suffice it to say that (in my opinion), the nominee feigned ignorance and a faulty memory to such a degree, the only conclusion I could glean was that this chick is about as sharp as a bowling ball.
Admittedly, I don’t hold a Juris Doctor degree, but it was pretty obvious even to me that a senate conference room is the closest Brown Jackson should ever come to the Supreme Court.
But with her being a judicial lightweight aside, Jackson’s body English would guarantee she’d lose the car, the house and the farm in any given poker game.
She’s got more tells than a confessional before Sunday morning Mass. Her weak attempts to control her frustration and anger with Republican senators could be seen as well as heard. The just-bit-into-a-lemon face and audible heaved sighs were certainly on display.
In two words, “Train” and “Wreck” best describe Jackson’s performance.
But back to the headline, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has made quite clear that he wouldn’t stand in the way if his fellow South Carolinian, US District Judge J. Michelle Childs, were nominated for the SCOTUS.
Even the #3 Democrat in the House, Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), made clear weeks ago that when Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Clyburn made clear that not only would he back Judge Childs, as reported by the New York Post, the Palmetto State’s two Republican senators (Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott) would throw their considerable weight behind Childs.
Specifically, The Post cited;
Clyburn told ABC News that he had talked with Scott and Graham and described both as “very high on Michelle Childs, and so I think that both of them would vote for her if her name were to be put in nomination.”
However, as noted by NPR, hard-lefties in the Jackass Party have actively attempted to torpedo any chance of Childs being nominated;
Childs started her legal career at the overwhelmingly white and male law firm of Nexsen Pruet LLC, in Columbia, S.C. When she arrived, one of the few women in the firm was Vickie Eslinger, a plaintiffs lawyer who says that in those days firms were not pigeon-holed into representing just employers or employees, and the firm did both.
The distinction is important because some on the left in the Democratic party have weighed in against Childs. Larry Cohen, a former labor leader and head of Our Revolution, a group with ties to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, told the Washington Post that “Childs has a record at an openly anti-union law firm.”
But Eslinger sees the criticism as preposterous, noting that when you are a young lawyer you do the work you are assigned to, and at the time that Childs worked at the firm, Eslinger says, it did not do “union-busting work.”
As I stated in the headline, if any of the GOP leadership in the US Senate has a lick of sense, they’d arrange one of those my-guy-will-talk-with-your-guy meetings.
Just my take, but a soft-boiled liberal like Childs is a damn sight better than a white-hating, pedophile-loving judicial activist like Jackson.