"Do you agree ... that babies are racist?"
This was Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz setting the tone for the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black female nominee for the US Supreme Court.
The second day of the hearings didn't take long to degenerate into a pitched partisan battle that is certain to further damage the image of a court that was once quaintly seen as above politics. While they probably can't stop her taking a seat on the high court, some Republicans tried to turn Jackson into a caricature of President Joe Biden's policies ahead of midterm elections in November and their own possible future White House bids. Wary of being seen as bullying the historic nominee, Republicans praised Jackson's credentials, character and intellect. But that didn't stop some of them from portraying her as an advocate for child predators, a friend of terrorists, associated with Marxist anti-White doctrine and soft on crime.
The GOP seems to be trying to use Jackson as a proxy in the midterms to portray Democrats as outside the American mainstream. The centerpiece of the attack is critical race theory — an academic theory holding there is systemic racism in US life, which conservatives have politicized. This explains why Cruz was mining the curriculum of the school that Jackson's children attended, which includes a book called "Antiracist Baby."
"Do you agree with this book that is being taught (to) kids that babies are racist?" Cruz asked.
In response, Jackson sighed, in one of her few signs of impatience in a long day. She said she didn't believe any child should be told they were racist. "I've never studied critical race theory and I've never used it. It doesn't come up in the work that I do as a judge," Jackson told Cruz.
How a school text over which Jackson has no control was relevant to her nomination was unclear. But Cruz had his political moment, which will be played on conservative TV for weeks. Other GOP senators with potential future presidential ambitions, like Missouri's Josh Hawley and Arkansas' Tom Cotton, also conjured confrontations with Jackson, accusing her of being soft on child pornographers and drugs kingpins in her career as a trial judge.
Their histrionics didn't seem to do much to dent Jackson's prospects. Democrats, after all, have a slim edge in the chamber that will vote on her confirmation. But Tuesday taught us a lot about how the Republican Party is lining up its culture war arguments for November — and how potential future presidential candidates not called Donald Trump plan to try to win over the party base.
