Outrageous and beyond the pale

Senate confirmation hearing 'outrageous and beyond the pale,' Booker says

The New Jersey Democrat said "the legitimacy of the Court" has been damaged by confirmation hearing tactics.

By ALLIE BICE

Sen. Cory Booker said Sunday that some lines of questioning by Republicans during the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last week were “sad.”

It’s no doubt that some Republicans were on the offensive during the hearings — Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked Jackson if she believed babies could be racist. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) called on her to define the word “woman.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) pressed her about her religious beliefs.

“What we saw though this week was to me outrageous and beyond the pale, and very different than what I’ve witnessed in my short time in the Senate seeing three different confirmation hearings,” Booker (D-N.J.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “What some of my colleagues did was just sad, frankly.”

Booker, who has vocalized his support for Jackson, said her temperament through the questioning is indicative of her character. She “dealt with it in an extraordinary way and showed America who she is, despite the outrageousness of the questioning,” he said.

Booker also added that she’s gone through a judicial confirmation process before to serve on D.C.’s Circuit Court, and none of these tactics were used then by lawmakers.

“We’ve seen the legitimacy of the court really suffer partly as a result of the tactics that we’ve seen going on in the Senate,” he said. “She was already appointed to the D.C. Circuit Court, which many people call the second most powerful court in our land, and none of this came out.”

Booker also defended Democrats’ challenges to Supreme Court candidates in the past who had been nominated by a president of the opposite party. Republicans last week argued that their questioning of Jackson was nowhere near as rough or problematic as that by Democrats in some recent hearings, particularly Brett Kavanaugh’s in 2018.

“There were extraordinary realities in the Kavanaugh hearings that demanded that to be as contentious as it was, and not just allowing it to go through without these extraordinary sort of realities coming to the floor and being investigated,” he noted.