Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Sunday that there are elements in the record of President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, “that are troubling.”
In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Sasse told host Trace Gallagher that “Supreme Court justices get lifetime tenure, and before that happens, there needs to be a vigorous, rigorous vetting of their records, and there are things in Judge Jackson’s record that are troubling.”
He added that he is “glad” that the confirmation hearing for Jackson is beginning on Monday and said that he hopes “Judge Jackson will be very forthcoming and transparent.”
Sasse made his comments after he was asked where he stands on issues raised by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who last week said Jackson’s rulings in nearly a dozen child pornography cases raised serious concerns about her judicial philosophy.
The White House on Friday shot back at what it called “disingenuous attacks” from Republicans, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki added that the accusation “relies on factual inaccuracies and taking Judge Jackson’s record wildly out of context.”
If confirmed, the appellate court judge would become the only former public defender to ever sit on the bench.
The Nebraska senator also said on Sunday that the “idiocracy version of Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court have been getting stupider and stupider since the [Robert] Bork hearings in the 1980s.”
“So the stuff the Democrats tried to do to Brett Kavanaugh and his wife and his kids were just unconscionably wicked,” he added. “But it’s part of a pattern that’s been going on for 30 years.”
“I want us to vet Judge Jackson’s judicial philosophy,” he said, adding, “I don’t want us to attack her as a human.”
“I want us to be having a debate about what her judicial philosophy is because when you go on a court, if you get lifetime tenure, it’s because you don’t confuse yourself with a super-legislator,” he said.