This part might have been fun, though...For reasons best known to himself, [Senator Ted] Cruz decided that the first Black woman ever nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court needed to be grilled about what he evidently perceived as a connection to critical race theory — a graduate school discipline lately demonized by Republicans, but that has played no part in Jackson’s jurisprudence or career. As Jackson patiently explained, “I’ve never studied critical race theory. I’ve never used it. It doesn’t come up in the work that I do as a judge.”
That wasn’t good enough for Cruz. Mischaracterizing critical race theory as assuming a “fundamental and intractable battle between the races,” he employed the classic McCarthyite tactic of insinuating guilt by association, in this case bringing up her membership on the board of trustees of the Georgetown Day School.
[...]
To drive his point home, Cruz displayed a stack of books that his staff discovered to be either assigned or recommended at Georgetown Day School. The one he found most “astonishing” was a children’s book by Ibram X. Kendi, “Stamped for Kids,” which is on the “summer reading list” for grades three through five. Having honed his recitation skills by reading aloud from Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” during a one-man Senate filibuster, Cruz inflected appropriate alarm over a short passage from “Stamped for Children”: “Can we send white people back to Europe?”
Never having previously seen the book, Jackson was unable to point out that Cruz had completely misinterpreted Kendi’s message, which was to show the historical offensiveness of telling anyone in the U.S. to “Go back to where you came from.” Nor did Cruz recognize that a summer reading list would be provided to parents, who of course would exercise supervision of their children’s actual reading.
[...]
Purging libraries, of course, was the essence of McCarthyism. In March 1953, McCarthy sent his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, on a tour of U.S. cultural center libraries in Europe for the purpose of identifying and removing so-called “communist” books from the shelves.
[...]
Meeting with reporters in Frankfurt, for example, he triumphantly displayed “The Maltese Falcon,” by the “hard-boiled” mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, as “proof that there were indeed Communists represented in the American library.”
[...]
Under orders from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, many books “stocked in our libraries throughout the world” were soon removed.
[...]
To his credit, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to go along. Speaking at the Dartmouth College commencement, he told the graduates, “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”
[...]
[P]erhaps a better-known admonition from the McCarthy era would be even more appropriate [for Senator Cruz]. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
The Hill
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) cut off Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in the midst of a series of questions about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s handling of child pornography cases, a subject that Cruz and fellow White House hopeful, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), have focused on extensively.
Durbin and Cruz got into a testy exchange after Durbin banged his gavel and informed his colleague that his 20 minutes of allotted time had expired. Cruz protested that Durbin had taken up some of his time by interjecting during his increasingly tense back and forth with Jackson.
Durbin at one point even advised Jackson that she didn’t need to answer Cruz’s questions because the Republican senator kept on interrupting her when she provided answers that didn’t directly address the details of the cases he was talking about.
The Hill
And Lindsey Graham had declared this wasn't going to be a circus.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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