Ketanji Brown Jackson says Roe v Wade ‘the settled law of the supreme court’ – live - The Guardian

Back to the Hart building, where senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas, is up. He appears to have posters. Cruz was Jackson’s law school classmate at Harvard, where he said they weren’t close but were cordial.

After exchanging niceties, he immediately dove into a culture war question about the 1619 project, which she mentioned in a speech she was asked to give on Martin Luther King Day. Jackson explained the context for the reference and said the project and is not relevant to her work.

Cruz pressed on, and is now asking her to define critical race theory, an academic theory that has sparked conservative outrage in schools.

Cruz’s line of questioning is a reminder that supreme court hearings offer ambitious senators a high-profile platform to score political points.

We’re taking a brief detour from Capitol Hill to the White House’s James Brady Press Briefing Room, where national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke to reporters ahead of Joe Biden’s trip to Europe on Wednesday, where he will meet with Nato and European Union leaders in Brussels and then go to Poland, amid the devastating Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He said that Russia “is never going to take Ukraine away from the Ukrainian people” and that “they are never going to complete their mission to subjugate this country.”

Sullivan noted that with Nato and Europe “we are unwavering in our commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty”, no matter the outcome of day to day military conflict or Russian efforts to occupy territory.He also said, in response to a reporter’s question, that in terms of Nato’s Article Five, where an attack on one member is considered an attack on all, that held also for a cyber attack.

And Sullivan said that since Joe Biden’s almost two-hour long call with Chinese president Xi Jinping last week, in which the US president warned his counterpart not to accede to Russian requests for assistance in its war on Ukraine, the US has not become aware of “the provision of any military equipment by China to Russia”.

He added that Biden intended to consult with allies at his meetings later this week to ensure a tightening of unity on this topic, ahead of a planned summit between European and Chinese leaders next month.It was a short briefing, without press secretary Jen Psaki, who has tested positive for coronavirus.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and a former prosecutor, asked Jackson a series of questions about voting rights, antitrust law, press freedom and waning public confidence in the court.

Jackson said public confidence in the supreme court is fundamental because that it is all it has to enforce its decision. She said she accepted Biden’s nomination in part because it would demonstrate to the public that the court works for and is reflective of all Americans.

I am here standing on the shoulders of generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity, from my grandparents who had just a grade-school education but instilled in my parents the importance of learning. And my parents, who I’ve mentioned here many times already, were the first in their families to go to college. So this nomination, against that backdrop, is significant to a lot of people and I hope that it will bring confidence, it will help inspire people to understand that our courts are like them, our judges are like them.

Earlier today, Psaki said that the president watched Jackson’s opening statement, and found it to be “strong, forceful and effective.”

Senator Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah and a lawyer who clerked for justice Samuel Alito, asked Jackson about how she decided sentences in cases involving child sexual abuse offenders.

Republicans have highlighted a handful of cases in which they say she handed down sentences below the maximum allowed by statue. She said earlier that these 10 cases do not reflect the full scope of her decisions and sentencing determinations.

“The guidelines are one factor,” she said. “The court is told you look at the guidelines, but you also look at the nature and circumstances of the offense, the history and characteristics of the offender.”

The nuance is unlikely to satisfy her critics, particularly Republican senator Josh Hawley who has yet to question her.

Jen Psaki said she is experiencing “mild symptoms” after testing positive for coronavirus, and she will work from home until her isolation period ends and she receives a negative test result.

The news of Psaki’s Covid diagnosis came as White House reporters were waiting for the start of her daily briefing, and the announcement caught the press off-guard, according to Bloomberg News’ Jennifer Epstein.

In a bizarre coincidence, this is the second time that a positive coronavirus test result has prevented Psaki from joining Joe Biden on an international trip. The press secretary first tested positive for the virus in the fall, right before Biden was scheduled to leave for Rome, Italy, to attend the G-20 summit.

Psaki tests positive for Covid-19

Jen Psaki has tested positive for Covid, just one day before the White House press secretary was supposed to travel with Joe Biden to Brussels, Belgium.
“Today, in preparation for travel to Europe, I took a PCR test this morning,” Psaki said in a statement. “That test came back positive, which means I will be adhering to CDC guidance and no longer be traveling on the President’s trip to Europe.”

Psaki noted Biden took a coronavirus test today, which was negative. Biden has been consistently testing since last week, when the president spent time with the Irish taoiseach just before the prime minister tested positive.

”I had two socially-distanced meetings with the President yesterday, and the President is not considered a close contact as defined by CDC guidance,” Psaki added.
Biden is scheduled to leave tomorrow for Brussels, where he will meet with Nato allies and European leaders to discuss the war in Ukraine. He will then travel on to Warsaw, Poland.

Senate judiciary committee chair and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin had something to say at the top of the afternoon session.

He expanded on the point we just posted about, whether, as Texas Republican John Cornyn just charged, Kentani Brown Jackson previously called president George W Bush and his then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld war criminals.

Durbin made clear that, while she was a public defender, Jackson filed several habeas petitions naming Bush and Rumsfeld in their official capacities when she was arguing on behalf of civilians being held at Guantanamo Bay who claimed they were wrongly classified as enemy combatants.

Durbin said that Jackson filed the petitions as part of her responsibility and they included claims for relief by the detainees as a result of them being tortured, which they considered and Jackson argues in her filings, is a war crime.

“There was no time when you called President Bush or Donald Rumsfeld a war criminal,” Durbin said.

Jackson thanked Durbin for making the clarification.

Role model to the lawyers of tomorrow.

A moment for feelings.

Classic Lindsey Graham calculated-combustion for the cameras (about whether detainees should ever be released from Guantanamo).

To which someone said this:

Aaaaand, Kerry Washington.

Ketanji Brown Jackson was peppered with questions from Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee about her previous representation of certain suspected terrorism detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

And John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, asked her about a reference to war crimes by the Bush administration at that time, when she was a public defender (something GoP members are constantly signaling is, by itself, in their views very controversial...)

Here’s some fresh context:

The hearing is about to restart. White House press secretary Jen Psaki is also due to hold her daily media briefing very shortly.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island and a longtime critic of the way undisclosed “dark” money shapes the judiciary, is up now. He is using his time to expand on his comments from yesterday, in which he said the current conservative supermajority on the supreme court was effectively underwritten by dark money groups such as the Federalist Society.

Those comments offended some Republicans, even as those same senators complained about the influence of much smaller and less organized progressive groups on Biden’s supreme court nomination.

Replete with posters, Whitehouse explained the way dark money influences the supreme court, apologizing for his digression, but stating that it was important to use the platform to demonstrate the shadowy financing that goes into a supreme court nomination.

He acknowledged that both parties use dark money to push their respective judicial nominees, but explained that there is a particularly powerful and well-financed operation among conservatives.

There is a drastic difference between rooting for somebody and controlling the turnstile that decides who gets on the court, controlling the funding of the political campaigns that pursue the folks on the court and actually once you get on the court ... that same anonymous money appearing before the court through phony front groups that file amicus briefs in little flotillas or if it’s an important enough case, a full armada of dark money-funded front groups,” Whitehouse said.

source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2022/mar/22/ketanji-brown-jackson-hearing-supreme-court-biden-us-politics-live

Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.