[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 60 (Tuesday, April 5, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1957-S1959]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                  Nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson

  Mr. COTTON. Madam President, the Senate will soon vote on the 
nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be Associate Justice of 
the Supreme Court. I will vote against her nomination.
  Judge Jackson may be a fine woman, but she is a dangerous judge. She 
built her career as a far-left activist, and it didn't change when she 
put on a robe 10 years ago. She personifies activism from the bench. 
She has crusaded to undermine criminal sentences, and she cannot be 
trusted to interpret the law or the Constitution as written.
  Judge Jackson's record makes clear that her brief stint as a criminal 
defense attorney wasn't motivated merely by a devotion to equal 
representation of all. It was part of a deep commitment to leniency for 
criminals. Indeed, she has continued to act as a de facto lawyer for 
criminals from behind the bench as she did from in front of it.
  Judge Jackson's average sentences for criminals are 34 percent 
lighter than the national average for criminal cases and 25 percent 
lighter than her own court's average, the DC District Court.
  Disturbingly, some of the most sensational examples of her soft-on-
crime attitudes are cases involving child pornographers. She has given 
more lenient sentences than recommended by the sentencing guidelines in 
every single child pornography case where the law allowed it--every 
single one, every time. Individuals sentenced by Judge Jackson for 
child pornography possession receive, on average, 57 percent lighter 
sentences compared to the national average. For child pornography 
distribution, the sentence is 47 percent lighter than the national 
average.
  These aren't just numbers. These are predators, and they go on to 
commit more of the most heinous crimes imaginable because Judge Jackson 
lets them off so easy. In one case, Judge Jackson gave child 
pornographer Wesley Hawkins just 3 months--3 months--in prison when the 
sentencing guidelines recommended 8 to 10 years--3 months versus a 
recommended 8 to 10 years. Judge Jackson even gave him a sentence that 
was one-sixth as long as what her own probation office recommended. And 
a few years later, when Hawkins should have still been in prison for 
his original offense, he did something else that got him 6 more months 
in custody. That is twice as long as his original sentence.
  When all 11 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee sent a letter 
asking for details of what happened to justify this new sentence, Judge 
Jackson refused to provide any further information--so much, I guess, 
for looking at her record, as she urged us to do.
  Her leniency isn't limited to child pornographers, either. In 2017, 
Judge

[[Page S1958]]

Jackson apologized--she apologized--to a fentanyl kingpin--his own 
words: kingpin--because she couldn't find a way to sidestep the law to 
give him less than the mandatory minimum sentence. She was very sorry 
that she had to give him such a long sentence.
  But I guess, where there is a will, there is a way. A few years ago, 
she found a way to resentence this self-described kingpin below the 
mandatory minimum sentence. Through a completely made-up 
reinterpretation, Judge Jackson made the First Step Act retroactive for 
this fentanyl kingpin, something Congress had explicitly tried to avoid 
when it passed the law. This was judicial activism, plain and simple.
  In her testimony, Judge Jackson claimed that there were no victims in 
that case. She is wrong. Fentanyl trafficking is not a victimless 
crime, and anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't belong on the 
Supreme Court.
  In another case, Judge Jackson granted compassionate release--
compassionate release--to a man who brutally murdered a deputy U.S. 
marshal on the steps of a church at a funeral. While in prison, this 
cop killer threatened prison staff and was caught in possession of a 
dangerous weapon--not exactly a model inmate. He was repeatedly denied 
parole. Yet Judge Jackson granted him compassionate release because he 
had high blood pressure.
  In yet another case, a career criminal assaulted a deputy U.S. 
marshal with a deadly weapon while resisting arrest. This was the third 
time that this criminal had assaulted law enforcement officers--the 
very officers who risk their lives to keep judges like Judge Jackson 
safe.
  Judge Jackson didn't just sentence him below the government's request 
or the sentencing guideline range. She gave the criminal less time than 
even the criminal himself had advocated. You can't make this stuff up.
  In 2013, a sex offender who had repeatedly raped his 13-year-old 
niece was arrested for falsifying sex offender registration records to 
avoid telling the government where he was living and that he was 
working at a daycare. The government sought a 2-year prison sentence, 
but Judge Jackson gave him just 1 year instead. And during that second 
year, when he would have been in prison, he tried to rape again and 
then bribed the victim with $2,500 to recant her testimony. This 
dangerous sex offender was convicted of obstructing justice, yet when 
presented with a do-over, Judge Jackson sentenced him to just 24 months 
in prison for those violations. I wish I could say this was to her 
credit because, to be fair, 24 months was the sentence recommended by 
the government. But she ensured in her order that this sentence would 
run concurrently with his sentence in local DC jail so he only ended up 
serving 1 year instead of 2.

  Judge Jackson habitually sympathizes with criminals over victims. 
These are just a few of the many outrageous cases in Judge Jackson's 
record. The takeaway is crystal clear: If you are a criminal, you would 
be lucky to have your case assigned to Judge Jackson. If you are a 
victim or anyone else seeking justice, you should hope that your case 
is assigned to literally any other judge. As a trial judge, though, 
Judge Jackson could only help one criminal at a time. As a Supreme 
Court Justice, she would be able to benefit criminals nationwide, in 
all cases.
  Judge Jackson's far-left activism extends beyond crime, as well. Not 
only did she engage in what the Sixth Circuit called an ``end run 
around Congress'' to retroactively reduce the sentence of the fentanyl 
kingpin I mentioned earlier, she also worked hard to strike down a 
Trump administration order expediting the removal of illegal aliens on 
equally specious legal grounds.
  The law passed by Congress granted the Department of Homeland 
Security ``sole and unreviewable'' discretion--``sole and 
unreviewable'' discretion--to decide which illegal aliens should be 
subject to expedited removal. Nonetheless, Judge Jackson inserted 
herself to strike down what she called ``a terrible policy'' by the 
Department of Homeland Security. Well, I regret to inform Judge Jackson 
that it is not her role in our system to decide whether immigration 
policy is good, bad, terrible, or any other adjective she wants to use, 
only whether it is lawful and authorized by law.
  And, of course, the DC Circuit Court, which is not exactly a hotbed 
of conservative jurists, agreed and reversed Judge Jackson's decision 
noting that there ``could hardly be a more definitive expression of 
congressional intent'' than the language in that law that she 
disregarded. But Judge Jackson didn't care. She had an anti-Trump op-ed 
she wanted to write in the form of a judicial opinion.
  Judge Jackson has also shown real interest in helping terrorists. It 
is true you shouldn't judge a lawyer for being willing to take on an 
unpopular case, but you can certainly learn something about a lawyer 
whose cases they seek out. And for Judge Jackson and her friends in the 
liberal legal profession, these cases were not unpopular at all. Judge 
Jackson represented four terrorists as a public defender, one of whom 
she continued to represent in private practice voluntarily, and she 
voluntarily filed multiple friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of 
terrorists while in private practice.
  To make matters worse, she apparently didn't even bother--when she 
was representing these terrorists, she didn't bother to establish a 
reasonable belief that what she filed with the court was factually 
true. Three of her four case filings were identical--word for word, 
comma for comma. She alleged identical facts and legal arguments in 
each case. The only differences between the briefs were the names and 
the case numbers. And in every one of those cases, she claimed the 
terrorists had never had any affiliation with the Taliban or al-Qaida. 
And in every one of those cases, she accused the Bush administration 
and American soldiers of war crimes.
  And who are these supposed innocent victims of American war crimes 
who, according to Judge Jackson, had nothing at all to do with 
terrorism, no siree, nothing at all? One of her clients designed the 
prototype shoe bomb that was used in an unsuccessful attempt to blow up 
a passenger airplane. Another planned and executed a rocket attack on 
U.S. forces in Afghanistan. And a third was arrested in a raid on an 
al-Qaida explosives training camp. Yet in every case, she claimed that 
none of them had anything to do with terrorism--not a thing, totally 
innocent, just goatherders who were picked up by marauding American 
troops.
  You know, the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go to 
Nuremburg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson 
might have gone there to defend them.
  Judge Jackson also refused to answer one commonsense question after 
another. For example, when Senator Blackburn asked her what a ``woman'' 
is, she pretended not to know. I asked her who has more of a right to 
be in the United States, new citizens who follow the rules or illegal 
aliens whose very first act in the United States was to break our laws. 
Judge Jackson refused to answer.
  When I asked the simple question of Judge Jackson whether releasing 
Guantanamo Bay terrorists would make us more safe or less safe, she 
again pretended not to know the answer, even though it is published by 
the Biden administration.
  I also asked Judge Jackson if criminals were more or less likely to 
commit a crime if they knew they would be caught, convicted, and 
sentenced. I asked this pretty basic question at least three times. It 
was not a hard question; yet, again, she refused to answer.
  Judge Jackson also refused to say whether packing the Supreme Court 
was a bad idea, even though the judge for whom she clerked and seeks to 
replace, Justice Breyer, and the late, sainted Justice Ruth Bader 
Ginsburg--neither of whom are known for their conservative views--were 
both willing to publicly denounce such court-packing schemes by the 
Democrats.
  Judge Jackson may feign ignorance, not because she doesn't know these 
answers, but because liberal judicial philosophy is all too often based 
on denying reality. As a judge, Judge Jackson has denied that reality 
again and again. Judge Jackson will coddle criminals and terrorists, 
and she will twist or ignore the law to reach the result that she 
wants. That is not what we need in a Supreme Court Justice, and that is 
why I will be voting against her nomination.

[[Page S1959]]

  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.