.MaddowBlog: Ketanji Brown Jackson has already been confirmed. So why did Lindsey Graham launch an attack ad against her?
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the next associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. It was about six hours later, at 8:12 p.m. eastern, when Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham congratulated the first Black woman ever confirmed to the nation’s highest court by releasing an attack ad.“In the last several years, we’ve had three Supreme Court hearings. The game has changed. Remember Amy Coney Barrett, how they came after her, remember Kavanaugh? I do.
Right off the bat, we’ve actually had four Supreme Court hearings in recent years, not three. As for whether people remember Amy Coney Barrett, I certainly do. In fact, I remember one specific Republican senator — I believe his name was Lindsey Graham —I also remember Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and the GOP senators’ indifference to credible allegations of sexual misconduct in the nominee’s background.
If comparing their hearings to Jackson’s process is “ridiculous,” it’s only because Democrats took the confirmation process in 2022 more seriously than their Republican counterparts did in 2020 and 2018. As for the senator patting himself on the back for having asked"hard questions," the record shows that Graham's questions weren't difficult,. “Uh, on a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would you say you are in terms of religion?” was one of the most outlandish questions in the history of Supreme Court confirmation battles, and it was asked by the South Carolinian who's now boasting about the quality of his lines of inquiry.
Graham proceeded to whine a bit about Democrats filibustering Janice Rogers Brown, neglecting to mention she wasn’t a Supreme Court nominee; Brown ended up getting confirmed anyway; and Brown really did haveBut as notable as the Republican senator’s errors and omissions are, what’s even more striking is