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GOP uses a Big TV moment for the midterms

I was told that this pedophilia attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson was a silly sideshow that nobody takes seriously and we needn’t worry about it. A review of the wingnutosphere tells me that it means a great deal to the right. Dave Weigel gives the background about this strategy:

The White House dismissed it with a joke. A National Review columnist called it a “smear.” And the paid media campaigns against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court have ignored it completely.

And yet, on Tuesday morning, the first accusation Jackson was asked to respond to was the one first made by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — that she had given sexual predators and people caught with child pornography the most “lenient” sentences she possibly could.

“These are some of the most difficult cases that a judge has to deal with,” Jackson said. “The statute doesn’t say, ‘look only at the guidelines and stop.’ The statute doesn’t say, ‘impose the highest possible penalty for this sickening and egregious crime.’”

Republicans haven’t settled on the best way to use this month’s hearings to damage Democrats, or to stop Jackson from becoming the first Black woman to serve on the highest court. 

But Hawley’s focus on sentencing requirements for child sex offenders comes straight from campaign trail, where cracking down on sexual predators and pornographers is a guaranteed winnerin general elections, especially in law enforcement and judicial races— even when there’s criticism of stings that capture people with no criminal records. 

“I haven’t been able to find a single case where she has had a child porn offender, a pedophile in front of her, where she hasn’t given him the most lenient sentence,” Hawley said in a weekend interview on Fox News. 

Republican politicians and activists have also, increasingly, used the language of child pornography crackdowns to pull sexually explicit books out of school libraries, asking whether the liberals who want this material available to children are “grooming” them for abuse. What might make some Republicans nervous in the Senate Judiciary Committee is a common topic in state politics.

“It’s not an argument supported by conservative elites, and politically it goes against [Mitch] McConnell’s light-touch, ‘keep it classy’ approach,” said Brian Fallon, the founder of Demand Justice, a liberal advocacy group that supported Jackson’s nomination. “It’s a sop to the QAnon element.”

Fallon was referring to a conspiracy theory that Hawley hasn’t endorsed — that political and economic elites, mostly Democrats, are engaged in child sex trafficking and even murder. By focusing on why Jackson did not pursue the maximum available penalty to child sex offenders, conservatives who agreed with Hawley’s strategy said that they were asking for documents from her term on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which could delay the final confirmation vote.

“Judge Jackson’s history of sentencing below guidelines, particularly in cases involving child exploitation, raises legitimate questions about her views on penalties for these crimes,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Saturday. At Monday’s hearing, Grassley said that the Sentencing Commission documents could also shed light on Jackson’s interactions with Fallon and his group. But the driving question is whether a judge who did not give the maximum recommended sentence to child sex offenders might have argued, in some document, that the recommendations are too harsh.

“Conservatives are simply asking that Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record at the U.S. Sentencing Commission be released,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project. “Her judicial and public records suggest that she was working to reduce sentences for child porn offenders.”

Since 1990, when Congress first voted to make the possession of child pornography a federal offense, the law has moved toward stiffer penalties, and never toward relaxing them. (Making and distributing child pornography was made a federal crime 13 years earlier.) 

The criticism of Jackson has three components: She wrote a 1996 article on whether it was constitutional to retroactively add sex offenders to a registry, she gave convicts less onerous sentences than the sentencing guidelines allowed, and that her own stance on the guidelines deserves investigation.

“This is a 25-year pet project for Judge Jackson, and it is very, very alarming,” Mike Davis, the founder of the conservative Article III Project, said on a conservative podcast shortly before the hearing. “Of all the issues that she could have taken on in law school, as a sentencing commissioner where she’s setting policy, as a district court judge — why is going easier on people who possess child pornography one of her pet issues?” 

When voters have gotten their say, judges seen as stopping short of the sentencing guidelines have landed in political trouble. Emily Horowitz, an academic who’s written critically of pumped-up sex offender laws, pointed to the fate of Aaron Persky, a California judge who handed down a six-month prison sentence in a college rape case, and was recalled by voters within months. 

The discussion about sentencing guidelines has happened in public, with the U.S. Sentencing Commission studying its own standards and asking whether they should be more nuanced. In a 2012 paper, the commission suggested that “the current guideline produces overly severe sentencing ranges for some offenders, unduly lenient ranges for other offenders, and widespread inconsistent application.” 

That was published during Jackson’s term on the commission. A year later, she was confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and the sentencing guidelines around child pornography never came up. 

But it comes up now, in many ways, from Senate races to school boards to the hearing room. Just last week, after Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) talked to the New York Times about using TikTok to promote his U.S. Senate campaign, Republican candidate J.D. Vance suggested that Ryan was soft on child sexual abuse.

“I know Tim Ryan is backed by the Lincoln Project,” Vance wrote on Twitter, “but maybe he should avoid the Chinese pedophile app.” In 2021, Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver resigned over sexually explicit messages he’d sent to young men; Ryan campaign spokeswoman Izzy Levy called the tweet “another pathetic attempt at relevance from Silicon Valley Vance.”

In the Senate race, the accusation was that one candidate was not taking child sexual exploitation seriously, and even giving a break to pedophiles. In this week’s hearings, the same sort of argument emerged. Hawley read the names and details of child pornography cases Jackson had ruled on, emphasizing that she had given some sentences far lower than the maximum, but not getting into details: One convict who had just turned 18 was not seen as a threat to children, but an older man who sent nude pictures of his child to an undercover FBI agent was. 

“You have stated publicly that it is a mistake to assume that child pornography offenders are pedophiles,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) during her opening statement. On Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) displayed the quote that Blackburn was talking about — a question about whether “people who may not be pedophiles” sometimes get trapped in the system.

“Do you agree with that sentiment, that there is some meaningful population of people who have child pornography, but are not in fact pedophiles?” asked Cruz.Advertisement

“Thank you, senator,” said Jackson, “for allowing me to address what appears to be a question in the context of a hearing on child pornography.” She was not on the ballot, but she might as well have been.

She has more intelligence, integrity and pure class than these Republican assholes have in their spindly pointer fingers.

This obsession with pedophilia is sick. And it says everything about the lurid imaginations of these people. I don’t know what screw is loose in their heads but it’s very, very loose. In fact it seems to have made its way to their nether regions.

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