This story was originally published by Daily Montanan: URL: https://dailymontanan.com This story has not been altered or edited. (C) Daily Montanan. Licensed for re-distribution through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. ------------ Sens. Grassley, Klobuchar question Jackson on second day of U.S. Supreme Court hearings – Daily Montanan ['Jennifer Shutt', 'More From Author', '- March'] Date: 2022-03-22 00:00:00 WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee began questioning Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Tuesday, giving the federal judge her first opportunity to go into detail about her life and career. Republicans, who seem unlikely to back her confirmation to associate justice, repeatedly pressed Jackson about her time as a federal public defender, how she approached sentencing people convicted in certain child pornography cases and her judicial philosophy. Each senator was allocated 30 minutes. Here’s how some senators approached the questioning and how Jackson responded: IOWA Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the committee and the first GOP senator to question Jackson, began his 30 minutes asking her about the First Amendment and then the Second. Jackson said that she agreed that the right to free speech applies equally to conservative and liberal protestors. In addressing Grassley’s question about the Second Amendment, Jackson noted “the Supreme Court has established that the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right.” Grassley then moved on to one of his long-time quests, getting cameras installed in the Supreme Court. Jackson didn’t give a direct answer, saying she would want to talk with other members of the court to “understand potential issues related to cameras in the courtroom before” she took a side in the years-long debate. “I think that’s a fair answer at this point,” he said. Grassley asked Jackson, who if confirmed would be the first Black woman on the court, to talk about race in American society, referencing a speech she gave to the University of Chicago Law School in 2020. During that speech, he said, Jackson quoted Martin Luther King Jr., who said that he dreamt of a day when sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners would be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood. Jackson, in the speech, then spoke about how American culture had changed after the civil rights movement and the passage of civil rights laws. Jackson said she still agreed with what she said in her speech, noting that her parents had attended segregated schools in Miami, but that she had not experienced segregation in education. “The fact that we had come that far was, to me, a testament of the hope and the promise of this country, the greatness of America that in one generation we could go from racially segregated schools in Florida to have me sitting here as the first Floridian ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States,” Jackson said. Grassley asked Jackson numerous other questions, including her view on adding justices to the Supreme Court, a proposal known as “court packing” that Republicans vehemently oppose. He also asked whether so-called “dark money groups” that don’t need to disclose who donates to the organization have “bought” the Supreme Court, which she denied, and which of the former 115 justices’ judicial philosophies most closely resembles her own. In response to the last question, Jackson said she hadn’t studied all of their judicial beliefs, but that she came to her confirmation hearings as a trial judge whose “methodology has developed in that context.” “I don’t know how many other justices — than Justice Sotomayor — have that perspective. But it informs me with respect to what I understand to be my proper judicial role,” Jackson said. Jackson declined to answer the question about potentially adding justices to the Supreme Court, saying that is a “policy question for Congress.” MINNESOTA Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota questioned Jackson about the Supreme Court’s so-called shadow docket, which doesn’t follow the usual process of a case making its way up through the federal court system before the Supreme Court hears oral arguments and then issues a ruling after months of deliberation. Klobuchar said she was concerned about the increase in the number of these “emergency” cases the Supreme Court has decided in recent years, including that some decisions aren’t signed by any of the justices. Klobuchar said it seems to her that Jackson’s preference to write lengthy opinions, spell things out and be transparent would be in contrast to the Supreme Court’s increasing use of a shadow docket. “These decisions have a profound effect on people’s lives,” Klobuchar said. The court’s one-paragraph decision last year to allow a Texas law barring abortion access after six weeks of pregnancy to go forward was one of its uses of the shadow docket, Klobuchar said. Jackson said the Supreme Court’s emergency docket needs to strike a balance between “the need for flexibility, the need to get answers to the party at issue” and the court’s interest in allowing an issue to “percolate, allowing other courts to rule on things before they come to the court.” Klobuchar also asked Jackson about whether the right to vote is fundamental. “The Supreme Court has said that the right to vote is the basis of our democracy; that it is the right upon which all other rights are essentially founded because in a democracy there is one person, one vote,” Jackson said. “And there are constitutional amendments that relate directly to the right to vote, so it is a fundamental right in our democracy.” Talking about her father, who was a newspaper reporter, Klobuchar asked Jackson about how the Supreme Court has ruled in previous cases that address what journalists can and cannot do with the guarantee of freedom of the press in the First Amendment. Jackson noted the court ruled in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964 that journalists are protected from liability. [END] [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2022/03/22/sens-grassley-klobuchar-question-jackson-on-second-day-of-u-s-supreme-court-hearings/ Content is licensed through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/