Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) leaped to the defense of radical Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on the second day of her confirmation hearing, favorably questioning her record of “lenient” sentences for defendants caught in possession of child pornography.
Durbin began by raising questions about her record of sentencing “non-production” cases below federal guidelines — a line of questioning in direct response to Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) Twitter thread last week, in which Hawley detailed Jackson’s rulings, interviews, articles, and speeches and accused her of “having a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes.”
Durbin’s first sympathetically queried about how Jackson’s family must have felt hearing Hawley’s accusations before asking her to comment on her judgment in the many cases Hawley detailed in his tweets.
“I thought about his charges as I watched you and your family listening carefully yesterday, and what impact it might’ve had on you personally to know that your daughters, husband, parents, family, and friends were hearing the charges that your implementation of this law, sentencing, endangered children,” Durbin said.
Hawley wrote that Jackson has a “disturbing record for any judge… But especially one nominated to the highest court in the land. Protecting the most vulnerable shouldn’t be up for debate. Sending child predators to jail shouldn’t be controversial.”