Jackson is very popular as a nominee: a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that only 27% of Americans oppose her confirmation while 42% support it (31% say they’re not sure what they think).
Many of the Republicans acknowledged that Judge Jackson is highly qualified for the position, but they cannot abide what they call her “activism,” by which they mean her willingness to use the federal government to protect the rights of American citizens within the states. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, says he opposes Jackson’s confirmation because he disagrees fundamentally with her “views on the role of judges and the role that they should play in our system of government.”
The “originalist” judges who object to the court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights control the court by a vote of 6 to 3. If she is confirmed, Judge Jackson will not change that split. The Republicans are looking to make their vision take over the court entirely.
The hearings for Jackson had Republicans questioning abortion rights, of course, but also the right to birth control, interracial marriage, and gay marriage. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have suggested they would also overturn Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 Supreme Court decision that says states must provide defendants with legal counsel. The attacks on Jackson for her time as a public defender—the element of our justice system that guarantees poor people can have lawyers in court—suggest that the right to publicly funded legal counsel, too, is no longer secure.
Ideologically opposed to Jackson, but unable to find real cause for attacking her stellar record, the Republicans have gone after her for what they claim is her lenient sentencing of child pornographers. These claims have been widely dismissed by legal experts as baseless: even a conservative writer for the National Review, who otherwise opposed Jackson, called them “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” But the party doubled down on the lies.
In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank ran the numbers. In the four days of the hearings for Jackson’s nomination, senators on the Judiciary Committee used the words “child porn,” “pornography,” and “pornographer” 165 times. They used some version of “sex” (“sexual assault,” “sex crimes,” and so on) 142 times. They said “pedophile” 15 times and “predators” 13 times, one time more than the Bill of Rights came up. Sometimes the words came from Democrats defending Jackson, but the overwhelming majority of the comments came from Republicans attacking Jackson. That pattern continued today as senators made statements before their votes suggesting that Jackson had done all she could to turn those who commit sex crimes against children loose on the country.
Their attacks worked on their constituents. Before Biden nominated Jackson, when a Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked people to assess Jackson’s qualifications, 57% of Republicans said she was qualified. Only 19% of Republicans (and 11% of all Americans) said she was not qualified. While the hearings made her lose some support across the board, it still left her popular with Democrats and Independents. Republican opinions, though, have changed dramatically. Now just 31% say she’s qualified, and 47% say she’s unqualified.
With their focus on sex crimes against children, Republicans are openly courting the QAnon vote, even though Republican words do not always seem to match their actions. We learned today that Florida governor Ron DeSantis delayed the release of public records involving a Florida state official, Halsey Beshears, who is linked to the underage sex crimes investigation in that state. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is also under investigation in that case.
The implications of the focus on sex crimes against children are larger than the next election, though. Republicans are increasingly abandoning the party’s position in favor of small government, a position it adopted under Ronald Reagan, and calling for a strong government to enforce right-wing social policies.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis on March 28 signed a bill banning kindergarten through third-grade public school teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, a measure its opponents have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The Walt Disney Company, which is the state’s largest employer with 80,000 employees there, didn’t take a position on the bill until finally, under intense pressure from inside the company, Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek came out against the measure and promised the company would donate $5 million to LBGTQ organizations.
DeSantis called Disney’s opposition “radical” and tore into “woke” corporations. He has suggested that the Florida legislature should cancel Disney’s special status in Florida, a status that essentially makes it a local government. Right-wing commentators have cheered him on, eager to use government power to retaliate against companies that bow to popular pressure in favor of Black rights, LGBTQ rights, and so on.
This has pushed them into the camp of authoritarians, and they are using fears of sexual attacks on children to win support for that authoritarianism. When Hungary’s Viktor Orbán won reelection yesterday, columnist Rod Dreher tweeted: “Viktor Orban wins crushing re-election victory. Groomers hardest hit. [Governor Ron DeSantis], you are onto something!”
Pushing Orbán’s voters yesterday was a referendum on the ballot that included questions like: “Do you support the unrestricted exposure of underage children to sexually explicit media content that may affect their development?” DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted: “Love the referendum idea. Wish the USA could do something similar[.]” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also applauded Orbán’s approach to “sex ed” and tweeted: “Congratulatons* to Viktor Orban on winning a victory well deserved! He’s leading Hungary the right way and we need this in America.”
As soon as his victory was announced—it was a done deal thanks to his manipulation of the mechanics of elections—Orbán reaffirmed his friendship with Russian president Vladimir Putin and took a hit at Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is defending his country against Putin’s invasion.
On that same day that Orbán took the side opposed to Zelensky, we learned more about the atrocities that took place in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, where Russian soldiers raped and executed civilians. “You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” President Joe Biden said today. “Well, the truth of the matter is, you saw what happened in Bucha…he is a war criminal.”
Today, the U.S., Europe, and allies prepared more sanctions against Russia, and the U.S. froze currency reserves Russia needs to make payments on its debt, forcing it closer to default.
If you don’t understand that right now our government is shakily balanced between the Democratic Party and a rightwing theocracy, then you’re not paying attention and you’re part of the problem.
some of you act as if voting for the Democrats is a naughty little treat for some politician you find uninspiring, rather than literally the ONLY bulwark we have against ceding federal power to rightwing theocrats who have made it PAINFULLY clear that they’re out to destroy all the rest of us, and I just wanna ask what alternate reality you’re living in and whether the rest of us can move there
I would also like to point out that if you’re too much of a weenie to handle the horrifying ethical crisis of casting a ballot when you don’t feel ~inspired~ about steering away from a rightwing theocracy, you don’t get to lecture anyone about direct action lmao. babygirl you can’t handle anything that might really challenge you, please don’t strain yourself (because you will for sure get yourself and others hurt)
so the supreme court just ruled that wrongful convictions can be upheld against evidence of innocence. If you’re imprisoned and sentenced to death but you didn’t do it and can prove it, it doesn’t matter. Legal counsel and evidence don’t matter. The justification is some states rights bs
like do y’all get the need to demand the complete abolition of prisons and police?? where is the veil of “public safety” when people say the criminal-legal system isn’t a function of safety, because i don’t see it. Why is there greater commitment to defending this system than building a real society of safety?
wait wait i dont get it
so youre saying that they can imprison those who are not only innocent, but can BACK UP those claims?
The evidence was never allowed to be shown in court, as it came after the initial trial, and all requests for retrial were dismissed.
Ultimately, it’s more about how retrial due to ineffective counsel (aka incompetent lawyers) was denied, and the Supreme Court agreed that there should be no retrial.
In a bid to keep Jones and Ramirez on death row, Arizona petitioned the Supreme Court to review their cases. The state argued that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a bill passed by Congress in 1996 that curtailed federal habeas review, did not allow federal courts to consider the new evidence in the two cases.
“Innocence isn’t enough,” Arizona Attorney General Brunn Wall Roysden insisted during oral arguments last year.
In other words, if an innocent person’s lawyer fails to present evidence of their innocence at trial, and their state post-conviction lawyer fails to argue the trial lawyer’s ineffectiveness, the innocent person is out of luck.
There are those who would say that holding grudges and chanting “We Told You So!” is a waste of energy, after the fact, that it’s mean-spirited, and vindictive, and maybe even cruel to rub people’s noses in it when they’re vulnerable and afraid.
And, philosophically speaking, I agree.
But I’m hurt, and angry, and I am going to stoop that low (I can be vindictive, too; I’m no saint).
Seven years ago, when Hillary Clinton was running for president against Donald Trump, we warnedthose of you who wanted Bernie Sanders to be your candidate, who said that Hillary Clinton was too center-right, that you just didn’t like her, who said if you couldn’t vote for Bernie, you wouldn’t vote for anyone.
We said: But if Trump becomes president, he’ll reshape the Supreme Court, and we will lose freedoms that we won’t get back for generations.
