Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) said Tuesday that he hasn’t decided whether to support the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and chided his Republican colleagues for using rhetoric that “was a little hot” during her confirmation hearings last week.
Romney’s comment came in response to a question about the tone and tenor of the hearings and Republican senators’ questions regarding the judge’s record during an appearance on The Source with Kasie Hunt on CNN+.
“Some colleagues on my side of the aisle, I thought, asked respectful questions and were able to elicit responses from her that I think were very helpful to those that are making an evaluation,” Romney said.
However, he added: “I think any setting like this that doesn’t show respect for the witness, or in this case the judge, is not the right way for us to go. We should show, in my opinion, more respect for one another. And so sometimes the rhetoric was a little hot.”
The senator said that he thinks “in the final analysis, we’ll each be able to make our decision based upon our personal interviews with Judge Jackson and with the results that come from these hearings.”
Democrats have accused Republicans of behaving inappropriately at Jackson’s hearings, all the while excusing their treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his own hearings in 2018.
Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) said Sunday that it is not a “simple conclusion” that both parties are at fault for how contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings have become.
“There were extraordinary realities in the Kavanaugh hearings that I think demanded for that to be as contentious as it was and not just allowing it to go through without these extraordinary realities coming to the fore and being investigated,” he said, referring to the tumultuous confirmation process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 after Christine Blasey Ford claimed he had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Kavanaugh denied the claims.
“What we saw though this week was, to me, outrageous and beyond the pale and very different than what I’ve witnessed in my short time in the Senate seeing three different confirmation hearings and I think that what some of my colleagues did was just sad frankly,” he added.
Booker said Jackson faced “over the top” questioning from several Republicans and decried several moments during the hearing as “deflating” and “disappointing,” including when Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) asked Jackson to provide a definition for the word “woman.”
Several other Republican senators, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, questioned Jackson on her sentencing record from her time as a federal district judge, noting a number of child-pornography cases where she imposed shorter sentences than the federal guidelines recommended. Hawley said Jackson’s record “endangers our children.”
Meanwhile, Romney said that he plans to undertake “a much deeper dive” into Jackson after he opposed her nomination to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in a Senate vote last year.
“I have begun a deeper dive, a much deeper dive than I had during the prior evaluation,” Romney said. “In this case, as well, she’s gone into much more depth talking about her judicial philosophy that she had before. And we’re, of course, looking at her judicial record, as a district judge and as an appellate judge, in far more depth than we had before.
Source: National Review
