OPINION:
Last month, when Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson took the podium at her Supreme Court nomination announcement, Americans got a made-for-television look at her life. But Ms. Jackson’s record tells a very different story. With Senate confirmation hearings underway this week, Americans deserve to know the truth about Joe Biden’s Supreme Court pick.
In a 2020 lecture, Ms. Jackson praised Derrick Bell, “the godfather of critical race theory,” and claimed his book sat on her family’s coffee table growing up. Mr. Bell’s work has been heralded as “a pioneering contribution to critical race theory,” the Marxist-rooted ideology that divides Americans by skin color and frames some as oppressors and others as oppressed. Mr. Bell believed the Constitution was like “roach powder,” that whites might commit “racial genocide,” and was guided by the motto, “I live to harass white folks.” In that same lecture, Ms. Jackson credited Mr. Bell’s widow, Dr. Janet Dewart Bell, for her “excellent insights” that inspired the “observations that I am presenting.” Just last year, Janet Dewart Bell delivered a slide show in which she passionately defended critical race theory, outlined the concept of “the property right in whiteness,” and likened the United States to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.
Ms. Jackson’s connection to CRT doesn’t end there. She’s praised the New York Times’s discredited “1619 Project” and called its creator Nikole Hannah-Jones an “acclaimed investigative journalist.” The 1619 Project contends that America is fundamentally racist and that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” Ms. Jackson reiterated the Project’s thesis that America’s real founding was the arrival of the first slave ship in North America in 1619 and that “the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it purported to be.” Hannah-Jones’s account has since been debunked by historians, five of whom wrote a letter to The New York Times saying they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.”
Ms. Jackson’s ties to and promotion of CRT would be troubling for anyone seeking a place on the Supreme Court. But it’s especially glaring at a time when CRT has come to dominate the national conversation. It begs the question of whether Ms. Jackson could faithfully administer “equal justice under law” as the court requires.
Ironically, while Ms. Jackson aligns herself with an academic who compared America to Nazi Germany, she was a member of a club that welcomed a known anti-Semite. During her senior year at Harvard, the school’s Black Students Association hosted a lecture by Leonard Jeffries, then a professor at City University of New York. Mr. Jeffries had previously made anti-Semitic statements such as “rich Jews who financed the development of Europe also financed the slave trade” and complained that “the Jewish Holocaust is raised as the only Holocaust.” And not long after speaking at Harvard, Jeffries compared Jewish people to “skunks” who “stunk up everything.” Mr. Jeffries was met with protests by Harvard students and faculty alike. But members of the BSA applauded Mr. Jeffries’s lecture. Whether Ms. Jackson attended the speech is unclear, but there’s no record of her condemning Mr. Jeffries or resigning from the group.
It gets worse, though. As a public defender, Ms. Jackson worked as a lawyer for several terrorists detained at Guantánamo Bay, including a Taliban intelligence officer who was likely a terror cell leader. Ms. Jackson didn’t simply give these terrorists a competent defense. Instead, she proved to be a “zealous” advocate. And while she insists her clients were assigned to her, she continued to advocate for Guantanamo terrorists after going into private practice.
Perhaps the most disturbing chapter of Ms. Jackson’s judicial background is her soft-on-crime stance, particularly when it comes to criminals who possess child pornography. As far back as law school, Ms. Jackson has been calling for an end to mandatory minimum sentences for child pornography, questioning requirements that convicted child predators register as sex offenders, and saying that some individuals who collect child porn are not, in fact, pedophiles. She has handed down more lenient sentences for several child predators, including one who “possessed thousands of images of child porn” and “hoped to travel across state lines to abuse a 9-year-old girl.” While sentencing guidelines called for 97-121 months behind bars, Jackson gave him just 57.
Ms. Jackson’s troubling record raises serious questions about her beliefs, legal philosophies, and how she would rule on the bench—questions the Senate must ask during this week’s hearings. Supreme Court justices are required to follow the Constitution, not divisive ideologies or political agendas.
Unfortunately, Ms. Jackson appears to be exactly the kind of radical activist judge Joe Biden promised to put on the Supreme Court.
• Ronna McDaniel is the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
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