Good morning. Senate Republicans are painting a false portrait of Ketanji Brown Jackson. |
 | | Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at the confirmation hearing yesterday.Hilary Swift for The New York Times |
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Here are a few facts about Ketanji Brown Jackson: |
- She frequently associates herself with a patriotic narrative of American history. "The first of my many blessings," she told the Senate this week, "is the fact that I was born in this great nation."
- She is not an advocate of critical race theory or other progressive ideas about education. She has never taken a public position on hot-button school issues like whether young children should be taught about gender identity.
- As a federal judge, she has a mainstream record, broadly typical of a Democratic nominee. She has often praised law enforcement, including her proud mention this week that her brother and two of her uncles worked as police officers.
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You might not know any of this — you might well believe the opposite — if you spent the past few days listening to Republican senators or consuming many conservative media sources. |
Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation hearing has turned into a case study of how disconnected from reality large parts of the Republican ecosystem have become. I know that description sounds harsh and will bother some conservative readers. But I think the facts warrant it. |
Birtherism to pornography |
The debate over Jackson's nomination has often had little to do with her. It has become an argument over a nominee who does not exist — one who does not respect America, is not truly religious, coddles child abusers and terrorists and has highly developed views about the importance of "woke" education. Yesterday, conservative activists used this portrayal to pressure moderate Democratic senators to vote against Jackson. |
Conspiracy theories and unfair accusations have a long history in American politics, of course. But they have often remained on the margins. Today, distortions and falsehoods have moved to the center of politics. |
While neither party is entirely innocent, there is a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats. False claims regularly flow from the leaders of the Republican Party — including its most recent president, several of its likely future presidential candidates and the most influential media figures aligned with the party. |
Donald Trump began his political career by claiming that Barack Obama was born in Africa and ended his presidency with false accusations of voter fraud. Prominent Republicans regularly cast doubt on the fact that greenhouse gases are warming the planet and contributing to extreme weather. Disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines has been so widespread that almost 40 percent of Republican adults have not received a shot, sometimes with fatal consequences. |
There is no comparable list of false information coming from senior members of the Democratic Party. |
 | | Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, presenting details of Judge Jackson's sentencing history.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times |
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The Jackson hearings have become the latest example. Several Republican senators — including Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz yesterday — have tried to portray her as soft on child pornographers. Their argument depends on a misleading cherry-picking of facts from cases she has heard. |
A useful debunking appeared this week in National Review, the conservative magazine, written by Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor who noted that he disagreed with Jackson on many legal matters. McCarthy also wrote that Hawley's accusations were "meritless to the point of demagoguery" and "a smear." Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has pointed out that some Trump nominees had a similar record as Jackson in child-pornography cases, and that Hawley voted to confirm them. |
Woke education has become another focus of the hearings, with Republicans like Cruz and Marsha Blackburn trying to portray Jackson as an advocate for it. In truth, she has not taken a position on the issues that fall under that category. Her sole — tenuous — connection to them is serving on the board of Georgetown Day School, an elite private school in Washington. |
That was apparently enough for the Republican National Committee to tweet an image of her this week, with her initials — KBJ — crossed out and replaced with CRT, an abbreviation for critical race theory. (Much of the Republican criticism of Jackson probably would have applied to any nominee, regardless of race, but it is hard to imagine the same tweet about a white judge.) |
The only time Jackson appears to have mentioned critical race theory publicly was in a 2015 speech. It was part of a list of disciplines that she said had an intellectual connection to criminal sentencing, including administrative law, philosophy, psychology and statistics. |
To be fair, Republicans are correct that many of the broader issues are legitimate matters of public debate. And on some of them, Republicans can make a credible case that progressive Democrats are to the left of public opinion (as Thomas Edsall, a Times Opinion columnist, explains). |
Most Americans oppose cutting police budgets, for instance. Many believe that allowing all transgender girls to compete in girls' sports can be unfair to other girls. Many voters — and not just white voters — think that liberals focus too much on racial identity. Most Americans feel proud of the country and its symbols, including those that some progressives consider racist, like Thanksgiving, the Constitution, the flag and George Washington. |
But in trying to make Jackson a stand-in for these views, Republican senators are distorting reality. They are creating a caricature of a liberal Democrat that bears little resemblance to Jackson herself. |
"One thing that is striking about this hearing," Lori Ringhand, a legal scholar, told The Times, "is how little effort we are seeing to engage the nominee on her views about actual legal issues." |
- After hours of patiently responding to accusations, Jackson displayed some pique at Hawley's focus on pornography and later dabbed her eyes as Senator Cory Booker praised her life story.
- A few Republican senators, including John Cornyn and Mike Lee, took a different approach, turning down the temperature to ask substantive questions.
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 | | President Biden with Prime Minister Alexander De Croo of Belgium in Brussels yesterday.Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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 | | Brittainy Newman for The New York Times |
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 | | Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state, in Washington in 2016.Alex Wong/Getty Images |
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Lives Lived: John Roach, a marketing visionary, helped make the home computer ubiquitous in the 1970s by introducing the fully assembled Tandy TRS-80. He died at 83. |
"Turning Red," Pixar's latest coming-of-age film, follows Meilin Lee, a Chinese Canadian teenager who transforms into a giant red panda whenever she feels an intense emotion — a metaphor for the growing pains of puberty. |
The red panda signifies Mei's journey from a dutiful daughter of Asian immigrants to a young woman bursting with messy feelings and challenging her family's expectations. The biggest trigger of Mei's panda, to her mother's dismay, is her passion for 4*Town, a boy band that resembles *NSYNC and BTS. "It's a side of teen girls that you never get to see," the film's director Domee Shi told The Times. "We are just as awkward and sweaty and lusty and excited as any boy." |
Former and current boy band fans will see themselves in scenes like the one in which Mei introduces each 4*Town member with a specific fact ("Tae Young fosters injured doves!") or when Mei and her friends record videos of themselves dancing to the band's hits (including "Nobody Like U," written by Billie Eilish and Finneas). |
With her friends' help, Mei learns to control her red panda, even harnessing it to raise money to see 4*Town perform. They will walk into that concert as girls, Mei says, and come out as women. — Ashley Wu, graphics editor |
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 | | Linda Pugliese for The New York Times |
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An exhibition in Florence presents the 15th-century sculptor Donatello as a master who transformed art history. |
The pangram from yesterday's Spelling Bee was commodity. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
"The Daily" is about Russia's approach in Ukraine. |
Natasha Frost, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti, Ashley Wu and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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