Graham Continued Questioning SCOTUS Nominee During Day Three of Hearing Wednesday
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today questioned Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in the third day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Hypocritical Treatment of Conservative Nominees:
Ø GRAHAM: “This is what the current president said when he was in the Senate, Joe Biden. Asking about Janice Rogers Brown being on the Supreme Court: ‘I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight, and she probably would be filibustered.’ That’s what he said about an African American conservative nominee by President Bush, who had served five years on the California Supreme Court. We’re not gonna live in an America like that any longer. To my Democratic colleagues: if you’re a person of color, a woman supported by liberals, it’s pretty easy sailing. But if you’re Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown, Amy Coney Barrett – on and on and on – your life gets turned upside down. [Judge Jackson] had nothing to do with that. I just make this observation that when you come up to me and talk about how moving this exchange was, I agree. I just want to remind you there was somebody else of color, a woman of color, that was picked for the DC Circuit, one of the highest courts in the land, that did not meet the same fate – and those days should be over.” https://youtu.be/zHx7053pejc?
On Sentencing for Child Pornography:
Ø JACKSON: “The point of the [sentencing] guidelines is to assist judges in determining what punishment to provide in cases, and there are horrible cases. But the idea is that between the range of punishment that Congress has prescribed, judges are supposed to be providing proportional punishment based on what a person has done. The sentencing scheme doesn’t place everybody at the same level. The point of judging and the guidelines is to look at what has happened in a case, compare defendants to each other in terms of what they’ve done, and give proportional penalties…”
Ø GRAHAM: “She has said, Mr. Chairman, she does not use sentence enhancements in the area of somebody using a computer for everybody.”
Ø JACKSON: “At the time that the guidelines were created for child pornography, this crime was primarily being committed by people who were literally mailing one, two, five, ten, one hundred photos at a time.”
Ø GRAHAM: “How is it being committed now?”
Ø JACKSON: “As a result, the Commission determined in the guidelines that it was a substantial aggravating factor if the facts of the case demonstrated that someone had been distributing hundreds of images because what that meant was over this long, maybe it was a long period of time, they had collected one photo at a time, they had amassed it, they had potentially mailed one at a time, and that showed really aggravated, terrible conduct. I’m not saying as a baseline, it’s not terrible. It’s all terrible. But what we’re doing is we’re differentiating among defendants. So in a world in which the mail is used for the purpose of distribution, it really matters whether the person has distributed one or five or a thousand [photos]. And so the guideline says, you know what, we are going to treat a person who’s distributed a thousand a lot worse because that shows that this person is really engaged in this really horrible behavior. In comes the internet. On the internet, with one click, you can receive, you can distribute tens of thousands. You can be doing this for 15 minutes, and all of a sudden, you are looking at thirty, forty, fifty years in prison.”
Ø GRAHAM: “Good, good! Absolutely good – I hope you are. I hope you go to jail for fifty years if you’re on the internet trolling for images of children in sexual exploitation. So you don’t think that’s a bad thing? I think that’s a horrible thing.” https://youtu.be/zHx7053pejc?
On Congressional Intent and Agency Discretion:
Ø GRAHAM: “The DC Circuit Court said there could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent. This is good as it gets. There’s no way to write a statute saying discretion lies in an agency. It’s non-reviewable. So you’re not convincing me that this is anything other than activism, and we can talk about it all day long, but I agree with the DC Court. This to me is an example, exhibit A of a judge ignoring limitations placed in the law by Congress to get a result they wanted.” https://youtu.be/zHx7053pejc?