Thread by @ElieNYC

Senator Dick Durbin really wanted the job chairing this committee, and it's his biggest moment so far. I am rooting for him. #ConfirmJudgeJackson

Is the Senate audio bad or am I having a stroke?

I hope they fix it for Grassley because he's hard enough to understand when you hear all the words.

I have not read all 500-plus of her opinions. I've read, like, 20-25. WHICH IS A LOT. Stop making me feel bad, Durbin. :)

Grassley with the first mention of alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh.

The Republicans cannot stop defending that corrupt, lying, and probably criminal buffoon.

Grassley: "there are others who think that the courts should make policy." Yes, his name is NEIL GORSUCH and he thinks that instead of executive agencies, the COURTS should fill in the gaps of Congressional statutes.

Grassley says Democrats voted against nominees that were "diverse racially." This is a good time to remind you that Donald Trump's nominees were 85% white and 75% male and he's the only president to not appoint a black male judge since Nixon.
The GOP is obsessed with identity.

Grassley is saying that Republicans haven't been given all the documents from Jackson's time on the Sentencing Commission. This is the same party which never gave the Democrats all the Kavanaugh documents from his time in the white house.

First mention of @WeDemandJustice! Drink.

ANYBODY WANT TO TALK ABOUT FED SOC NOW???

Grassley is now equating an Amy Coney Barrett pro-bono case with Jackson's TWO YEARS of federal public defense. And now he's suggesting that being a *full time* public defender means that you don't support criminal laws.

Pat Leahy now: "Judge Jackson is NO judicial activist."

This was a line the GOP was using against liberals, like 20 years ago. Republicans are FOR judicial activism now. They're pro judicial activism in defense of bigotry and guns.

Leahy: "Most Americans want to know that they can get a fair shake at court."

... I WANT THE COURT TO STOP BIGOTS AND DEFEND A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO THEIR OWN BODY.

Also, sure, fairness and shit.

Graham up. Lindsey Graham had a picture of him and Kavanaugh as his Twitter profile pic for about 2 years after he screamed and sneered in defense of the man.

Graham just wants to make sure everybody knows that Republicans don't care about being racist any more.

WE KNOW, BRUH.

Now comes the Judge Childs stuff.

Essentially the Republican game is to say they would support *a* Black woman, just not *this* black woman.

Graham is essentially trying to inoculate Josh Hawley from his underhanded attacks designed to call Jackson a pedophile and rile up the QAnon base.

Graham is *once again* yelling about Kavanaugh.

IF WE WANT TO RELITIGATE THAT, WE CAN. LET'S START WITH KAVANAUGH BUDDY CHRIS WRAY

thenation.com/article/politi…

Graham always likes to say "the game has changed" as a precursor to being a hypocrite to go back on his principles. Like, putting aside that McConnell is the one who change the rules and it's not "a game," the argument that HE can lie because he didn't get his way is ludicrous.

Feinstein is the first one to mention the abortion issue. And the environment.

Ahh.. issues, I remember those.

Feinstein sounded lucid and spry.

John Cornyn is up. He's talking about how many confirmation hearings he's been a part of. I honestly feel like Cornyn has never once added anything to these proceedings. He... basically can't keep up. He doesn't know the law well enough.

I mean, right now, listen to him. He's giving a middle school recitation of civics. Which is Ben Sasse's entire game and Sasse does "earnest social studies teacher" better.

Cornyn brings up Federalist 78. Here's what I've written about it:
"The next time Hamilton would be as wrong about something, he’d be firing a gun into the sky as Aaron Burr shot him to death."

ballsandstrikes.org/court-reform/s…

#2 @WeDemandJustice mention.

I don't think we can ever be as well funded as @FedSoc but Republicans are about to fuck around and find out.

Cornyn: "It appears that some times this zealous advocacy has gone beyond the pale"
What does this mean? HONESTLY @TexasTribune ask your boy WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
KBJ defended clients. What's "beyond" that he's talking about???

Yay. @SheldonforRI is up.

BIAS ALERT: I like Sheldon Whitehouse.

Whitehouse: "She wasn't groomed in partisan petri dishes."

Nice. This is a dig about how ACB is basically a law professor who was made in a @FedSoc lab, while KBJ has been in an actual courtroom.

Mike Lee is up.

BIAS ALERT: I actively hate this man.

Mike Lee said "politics of personal destruction" and I think 2000 wants its catch phrase back.

Add Lee to the list of "Republicans pissed that Kavanaugh was credibly accused of attempted rape"

Lee: We respect the decisions of the Supreme Court
John Roberts: Really?
Lee: Unless they turn Obamacare into a tax like a dirty communist.
Roberts: Just checking.

Mike Lee: "The Constitution, written by wise men over 200 years ago. Wise men who I believe were raised up by God for that very purpose."

Bite me.

Lee says that we maintain the rule of law by tying ourselves to the original public meaning of the slavers who wrote the constitution.

I disagree.

Mike Lee "But nine is a number that works. It's worked for 150 years."

"Didn't work for me" -- Homer Plessy.

Imagine thinking that GOD inspired a bunch of 18th century white men to write a slaver's document.

Klobuchar is doing the "this is your life" opening statement. She's very good at it. I think @amyklobuchar is the best straight up *lawyer*, straight up *advocate* on the Judiciary Committee right now.

You notice how Republicans keep bringing up Kavanaugh? And Democrats keep brining up Ukraine?

DEMOCRATS SHOULD KEEP BRINGING UP JANUARY 6TH. We need to protect Democracy RIGHT HERE. And Jackson is going to HELP by REJECTING COUP ATTEMPTS by Republicans.

Cruz: "Only 115 men and women have served as Supreme Court justices."

That's one way of putting it. Another would be: "Of the 115 people who have serves as Supreme Court justices, 110 of them have been men."

Cruz: "Our Democratic colleagues want to Supreme Court to be anti-democratic."

No. NOOO... We want the Supreme Court to be PRO Human rights.

Literally... JUST ENFORCE THE 14th, 15th, 19th AMENDMENTS AND WE'RE PRETTY MUCH GOOD

Cruz, not content to merely defend alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, feels like he must defend alleged sexual harasser Clarence Thomas.

Cruz: "no one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits."

No, the GOP is just going to call her a pedophile.

Cruz is talking about filibustering Neil Gorsuch, without mentioning the UNPRECEDENTED OBSTRUCTION of Merrick Garland!!

And now, Chris Coons

Coons is basically doing what Klobuchar was doing but in centrist.

Having just said that Sasse does social studies teacher better than Cornyn, make no mistake, I find Sasse's 8th grade civics presentations to consistently be some of my most annoying moments during these hearings.

Sasse, from Nebraska, is complaining about "yokels" who protested judges who were appointed to take away women's rights to bodily autonomy.

But if I call Sasse "A yokel high school social studies teacher who got elevated to the Senate like a high school basketball coach gets elevated to social studies teacher" suddenly *I'll* be the East Coast elitist.

Sasse reminds me of the kid who beat me on the "name all the state capitols" quiz because I went with Reno instead of Carson City and then bragged about it for a year

Blumenthal is starts the process of defending KBJ's record.

Dems... have a plan here. It's a little paint by numbers, but there's a plan.

Blumenthal points out that Republican nominees have come before the committee and said that they'd respect precedents, and then they get on the court and they don't.

This is a good argument, but I'd call KAVANAUGH out by name.

Ukraine reference number 3.

Again Dems: The Supreme Court cannot help Ukraine. It CAN help democracy here. MAKE THE LINK.

Hawley up: I just... this fucking guy.

Here's my article about the 7 child porn cases Hawley has cherry picked

https://twitter.com/thenation/status/1505951125333291011?s=20&t=5u-1N0MvmI7HbZdsuVUPPA

Here's @imillhiser deeper dive on the same thing

vox.com/2022/3/18/2298…

Again, Hawley is 100 percent aware that these kind of attacks inspire his violent QAnon base to take action. AS DOES Judge Jackson, who sentenced the Pizzagate guy to four years in prison (I bet Hawley doesn't have the guts to bring that up).

Hawley: "It's hard to argue that child porn guidelines are too lenient"

Somebody should alert Hawley to Neil Gorsuch's views on the matter.

Hirono: more KBJ biography.

Honestly I'd spend my five minute after Hawley going in on Josh Hawley, but Hirono is probably right to just go back to form.

Hirono has gone in more on the *historic* qualifications of the nominee than anybody since Durbin's opener.

Tom Cotton opens up with some pro-gun lunacy. Now he's going after vaccine mandates. And now immigrants. And now CRT. I CAN'T TYPE FAST ENOUGH.

This is a segment of Tucker Carlson.

And now we're to defund the police. "Soft on crime" policies. It's, just like a bunch of catch phrases.

This isn't a job for me, this is a job for @ddale8

Cotton is saying it's not enough to say that Jackson would faithfully apply the law. She's supposed to, I dunno, agree with Tom Cotton. Which nobody has done since John C. Calhoun.

Cotton is essentially asking for judges to give fetal personhood rights while claiming to not want justices to rewrite the law from the bench.

The man can't get through a SENTENCE without internally contradicting himself.

Senator @CoryBooker is up. He's joyous. Very on-brand. :)

Booker: "We shouldn't diminish the accomplishments mostly of these 108 white men."

... The word "mostly" is doing A LOT of work. ;)

Every time I hear Booker now I think about how Trump for real tried to scare white suburban women with the threat that Cory Booker might move next door.

DELTAS have entered the chat.

Every time Senator Kennedy starts to act like he's a drooling idiot, remember that he's a RHODES SCHOLAR and his entire thing is AN ACT

The fucking people who support judges who are LITERALLY ABOUT TO TAKE AWAY ABORTION RIGHTS in the face of 50 years of precedent are for real talking about the court's "legitimacy" and it's goddamn gross.

Kennedy says he believes in the Bill of Rights.

Sure, let's talk about the: FOURTH, FIFTH, SIXTH, SEVENTH, EIGHTH, OR NINETH AMENDMENTS FOR ONCE

Kennedy pisses me off because while Sasse and Cornyn are simpletons Kennedy merely PRETENDS to be one.

Kennedy making the argument against the administrative state. This is a "live" issue because the Gorsuch wing of the Court is trying to destroy the administrative state and THAT'S how they actually intend to stop environmental or climate legislation.

Kennedy: "The American people love democracy. And the American people are not fools."

Counterpoint: The American people are idiots and the election of Donald Trump proved it.

Hey it's Alex Padilla. This is @AlexPadilla4CA's first Supreme Court confirmation hearing since he was appointed to Judiciary. Welcome, sir.

Padilla is the only Latino on the Judiciary committee... unless you count Ted Cruz... which I would count because the Senator from Cancun should be counted, but I suspect he doesn't always want to be counted.

Padilla is now exposing me as a dumb uneducated product of American education because he's doing the last bit of his opening in Spanish.

Thom Tillis: "I think you have a strong track record of ethical values."

Me: ... Thom... you're ruining my narrative here.

Tillis: "I reject the notion of the constitution being a living document."

Me: ahh, phew, I was worried your weren't going to go "republican".

Joking aside: @ThomTillis is being very fair and reasonable here and this is what Republicans were going to do it would be fine. This is reasonable, fair opposition. This is good. Good Thom Tillis. Everybody can live with this.

Tillis will not vote for KBJ. On purely ideological grounds. That's okay. He still is treating her with respect.
I would not have voted for Neil Gorsuch or John Roberts or Sam Alito, even though all of them were very well qualified.

WOOO. Welcome to the Judiciary committee, Senator @ossoff

He has fired out with the Arbery murder, and THEN goes to how you can tell how long people will wait to vote in Georgia based on the district they live in. LET'S GO.

Ossoff is READY for this folks. He's a live one.

Ossoff talking about the surveillance state, war powers clause, free speech and free press rulings. ISSUES, my friends, ISSUES FOR DAYS.

OMG, the move from Ossoff to Marsha Blackburn is going to jerk my brain so hard I'm going to get a concussion.

The last time Blackburn had a black judicial nominee in front of her she talked about his traffic tickets and called them a "rap sheet."

Oh great, Blackburn is going full TERF

Blackburn "parent's constitution rights to rear their kids."

What's really gonna piss these so called constitutional textualists off is that there is no such right spelled out in the constitution.

*I'M* the guy who thinks the constitution includes it IN THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY

Blackburn is now criticizing Jackson for letting people out because of Covid.

You know who also got let out early because of Covid, PAUL MANAFORT

Now Blackburn is going all in on the pedophile smear.

Blackburn wonders what Jackson's "hidden" agenda is and suggests that it could be to let criminals and pedophiles back onto the streets.

I like Blackburn because she really rips off the mask Lindsey Graham tries sooo hard to put on.

GOP: We're not going to do personal attacks.
Blackburn: WHY DO YOU LOVE KIDDIE PORN?

Dolores Umbridge: Children who speak of He who cannot be named are liars.
Marsha Blackburn: TEACHING KIDS ABOUT CHOICE RUINS AMERICA.
JK ROWLING: YEAH!
Umbridge: I'm written to be an asshole and even I don't say this crap.

This Republican Judge Thomas Griffith is the *first person* today to even mention authoritarian attacks on democracy *at home* and I honestly don't understand why Democrats are so afraid of making this point!