Senator Hawley's Lane for 2024: Insurrectionists and QAnoners

When I first heard that Senator Josh Hawley had accused Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson of "letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes," I despaired that her confirmation hearings (which begin on Monday) would become a nightmare. 

Knowing that there’s been a lot of debate in legal circles about appropriate sentencing for possession of child pornography, what I envisioned was the American public witnessing an endless stream of hair-splitting over punishment for that particular crime. It is understandable that child pornography brings out fear and loathing in a way that nothing else can. But that’s why it could spell the end for one of the most qualified nominees to ever be considered.

But then Press Secretary Jen Psaki landed the first blow - indicating that Hawley might want to think twice before pursuing this line of attack.  

Psaki response on Hawley: I’m not sure someone who refused to tell people whether or not he would vote for Roy Moore is an effective incredible messenger on this pic.twitter.com/dWO6B68D0i

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 17, 2022

Ben LaBolt, one of Jackson's advisors, managed to take on Hawley's attack without getting into the hair-splitting nightmare I had imagined.

This is toxic and weakly-presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context - and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny. It’s based on a report unanimously agreed to by all of the Republicans on the US Sentencing Commission on selectively presenting a short transcript excerpt in which Judge Jackson was quoting a witness’s testimony back to them to ask a question, and failing to note what sentencing practices are across the entire federal judiciary regarding these crimes.

In the overwhelming majority of her cases involving child sex crimes, the sentences Judge Jackson imposed were consistent with or above what the government or U.S. Probation recommended.

And finally, Ruth Marcus dug into the record to demonstrate that Hawley had cherry-picked quotes out of context. Here's just one example:

Count one is her writing as a student editor on the Harvard Law Review, about sex-offender registries, DNA databanks and civil-commitment laws that states were busy enacting. In her article, Jackson grappled with the tension between constitutional limits on permissible punishment and the community’s need for self-protection...

Hawley wrenches a few lines out of context. “As far back as her time in law school, Judge Jackson has questioned making convicts register as sex offenders — saying it leads to ‘stigmatization and ostracism.’ ”

Hello, Senator? That is in a section headlined “The Critics” that outlines the views of the statute’s opponents. Hawley might just have easily quoted from the previous section — “commitment legislation literally immobilizes dangerous sexual deviants and, thus, presumably promotes both immediate and long-term public safety.”

Josh Hawley is an intelligent person who got his law degree at Yale. He knows how to read and analyze documents like the ones he chose to highlight. So its clear that he is lying about Judge Jackson's views intentionally, not out of some misunderstanding about what she's said/done. 

That's why it is important to remember what the senator from Missouri was doing in the photo above. He was cheering on the insurrectionists who would go on to storm the Capital on January 6. Those are the people he wants to appeal to when he runs for president in 2024. With this latest smear of Judge Jackson, he's also telling us who he views as his constituency. Joe Conason explained.

With that foul smear, Hawley joins an undeniably psychotic element of his party — the growing cohort affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy cult, which proclaims constantly that prominent Democrats and Hollywood stars are sexually exploiting and even murdering children. There is no evidence for these sick accusations, but that hasn't stopped the fascist-leaning wing of the GOP...from endorsing them.

While Senator Mike Lee seems to be the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to echo Hawley's lies (so far), Media Matters has documented that the attacks are reverberating around right wing media, including those that traffic in QAnon conspiracies. So Hawley seems to be revving up exactly the audience he is targeting for his presidential campaign.