The GOP needs Manchin for the Supreme Court battle.
Republican Senators’ treatment of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during last week’s hearing has drawn criticism from moderate Democrat Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who called their actions “embarrassing” and “disgraceful.”
Manchin’s remarks were directed at the GOPs repeated questioning surrounding Jackson’s sentencing of child pornography offenders.
The West Virginia Democrats pointed to the behavior of his Republican Senators, who had constantly cut off Jackson when she was answering questions about her sentencing decisions.
Discussing their inappropriate actions, Manchin noted, “It was disgraceful, it really was, what I saw. And I met with her, and I read all the transcripts. I listened to basically the hearings, and it just was embarrassing.”
He chastised their behavior, saying the Republicans were not doing what Senators are “sent here to do” by attacking “other people and just try[ing] to tear them down,” adding that he “won’t be part of that.”
Manchin then went on to praise Jackson, saying, “I think she’s extremely well qualified, and I think she’ll be an exemplary judge.”
The remarks Manchin made seem to reference the aggressive treatment Senators on the Judiciary Committee, including Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), gave Jackson.
During the hearings, Cruz and Hawley questioned Jackson incessantly about her sentencing decisions in seven child pornography cases, where she handed offenders lighter sentences than what prosecutors had suggested.
On the second day of the hearing, Hawley queried Jackson about the alarming details of a case that had already been brought up by GOP Senators several times before; when answering, Jackson became frustrated.
In response to Hawley’s question about whether she regretted the sentence of that particular case, Jackson said, “What I regret is that in a hearing about my qualifications to be a justice on the Supreme Court, we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on this small subset of my sentences.”
Later on that day, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) criticized the actions of “four or five” Republicans who he said were disrespectful to Jackson despite pledging to be “dignified.”
He commented that the “notion of asking the toughest and meanest questions and then [racing] to Twitter to see if somebody is tweeting it” was as bad as “playing the cameras on the worst day.”
