Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson faces senators' questions for the first time Tuesday
Responding to Sen. Dick Durbin, the Judiciary Committee chairman, she also pushed back on Republican suggestions that she has given light sentences to child pornographers.
Tuesday's hearing was the first of two days of questioning after Jackson and the 22 members of the committee gave opening statements on Monday. On Thursday, the committee will hear from legal experts before an eventual vote to move her nomination to the Senate floor. Biden chose Jackson in February, fulfilling a campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court for the first time in American history. She would take the seat of Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced in January that he would retire after 28 years on the court.
In the opening statements, Democrats on the Judiciary panel sought to preemptively rebut Republican criticism of Jackson's record on criminal matters as a judge and before that as a federal public defender and a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency created by Congress to reduce disparity in federal prison sentences.
The questions about her sentences for child pornographers first came from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who said in his opening statement that his research showed that she had a pattern of issuing lower sentences in child pornography cases, repeating comments he wrote in a Twitter thread last week. The Republican National Committee echoed his claims in blast messages to supporters.
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