
GOP questions reveal the bad-faith scrutiny reserved for Black nominees
CNN
If confirmed, Ketanji Brown Jackson would be the first Black woman to serve on the US Supreme Court.
However, many Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are wasting no time embracing the kind of bad-faith scrutiny often reserved for women and Black nominees -- beneficiaries of affirmative action, in one GOP senator's parlance.
Some Republicans, lacking a coherent strategy, are pressing Jackson for her views on The 1619 Project and the children's book "Antiracist Baby" (because "critical race theory"), though neither has anything to do with the job she's being considered for. Others are trying with great effort to cast the nominee as weak on crime by distorting her past work defending Guantanamo Bay detainees and her sentencing in child pornography cases.

More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.












