Josh Hawley’s ‘smear’ against Ketanji Brown Jackson is Missouri senator’s hallmark

Even before it was Missouri Showboat Josh Hawley’s turn to question Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at her confirmation hearing on Monday, our junior senator had succeeded in getting himself name-checked by two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Eat your heart out, Ted Cruz.

Committee Chairman Dick Durbin of Illinois and Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal both approvingly quoted a piece by Andrew McCarthy, of the conservative National Review, whose Monday column noted that Hawley’s spurious attack on the nominee as a coddler of pedophiles “appears meritless to the point of demagoguery.”

Yes, that’s our senator. And unlike Hawley, McCarthy has years of experience in actually trying child porn cases.

“There are strong philosophical arguments for opposing Judge Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” McCarthy wrote. “And she may in fact be too solicitous of criminals. But the implication that she has a soft spot for ‘sex offenders’ who ‘prey on children’ because she argued against severe mandatory minimum prison sentences for the receipt and distribution of pornographic images is a smear.”

Smears are a Hawley hallmark, and he’s proud not to be “backing down” from the claims destroyed by McCarthy, as well as by multiple fact-checkers.

Remember Hawley’s performance at Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing, when he waved around a stack of newspapers, à la Joe McCarthy, and spoke out against the faith-based attacks against her? The only problem being that there were no such attacks, either in those newspapers or by his Democratic colleagues.

When voters stop rewarding such behavior, we will stop seeing so much of it.

When Hawley got his turn to “question” — actually, talk at — the nominee, who if confirmed would be the first Black woman to serve on the court, he said how much he’d enjoyed meeting with her and respected her candor in that meeting. He’d found her “enormously thoughtful,” he said, and “enormously accomplished.”

And “by the way,” he added, “I’m admiring how you’re sitting so stoically through all of this senator talk.” Such condescension does require stoicism, yes.

Then he reiterated his questions about her supposed leniency toward purveyors and consumers of child porn. As the hearings continue, he said, “she deserves the ability to speak for herself on this issue.”

This pretend issue, he no doubt meant to say. And was there ever any question about whether she deserves the ability to speak for herself?

We look forward to hearing from the nominee, who also deserves better than to be smeared by Josh Hawley.