Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed The Tennessee Star’s National Political Editor Neil McCabe to the newsmaker line to comment upon the ongoing hearing of SCOTUS nominee Kentanji Brown Jackson and whether or not she will be confirmed to the court.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line right now by the very best Washington correspondent in the country, the national political editor for The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network, Bronze Star award recipient, as well as a Sergeant First Class in the United States Army Reserve, Neil W. McCabe. Good morning, Neil!
McCabe: Good morning, Michael. I hope everything is dress right dress this morning.
Leahy: (Laughs) Sergeant First Class McCabe. By the way, congratulations on becoming a Sergeant First Class.
McCabe: Thank you.
Leahy: It’s a big accomplishment.
McCabe: They said it couldn’t be done.
Leahy: Let’s get the inside scoop first. Let’s start with the SCOTUS hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson. The Republicans asked a number of questions that she didn’t answer particularly well. Is that going to make any difference?
Can you give us a sense of where this confirmation hearing stands right now? Is she on a glided path to confirmation? Is she in trouble? What do you think the vote will end up being on the floor of the Senate, which is now 50/50, D and R?
McCabe: Well, I think as you said, it’s 50/50. And the Republicans have two goals. One, hold all the Republicans on side, and two, try to pick off some of those Senate Democrats who might be in trouble because of the red wave that’s coming their way – most notably maybe a Mark Kelly, in Arizona. The way they think they can do it was really begun last week when they started talking about her sentencing of child pornographers or people who have sex crimes. And so this is a unique approach, because it puts people on defense, and they can’t really go after them as racists.
And so it makes things very uncomfortable for the Democrats, and it made it especially uncomfortable for a number of Republican senators who are looking to show that they could support Biden’s nominee and be a good guy.
And so that immediately held all the Republicans on side. And now the goal is to try to pick off some Democrats. And we saw as the confirmation hearings went on, it was about 13 hours yesterday, and you saw Jackson, who started off following the script that the White House gave her, where you thank the Republican senator for his or her question, and then you basically say, but as a Supreme Court Justice, I really can’t get involved in these things, or I’m really not an expert.
And so she stopped thanking the senators as the day went on, and she started to get a little sassy. And I thought probably the best example of her sass is when she told Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn that she could not give the definition of a woman because she’s not a biologist, she’s a judge.
Leahy: By the way, I thought that question from Marsha Blackburn was outstanding, because it got a very bad response, I thought, from the nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson. Your thoughts about her statement, she couldn’t define a woman.
McCabe: Right. And so what’s happening now is she sort of stopped the pretense and she’s now starting to engage the senators. She got nasty with Cotton. She got nasty with Hawley.
At one point, or maybe two different points that I can remember, she sort of referenced Amy Coney-Barrett and saying, well, just like Barrett, Barrett answered it this way, and that’s how I’m answering it. And then with Ted Cruz, when Ted Cruz was pressuring her on the fact that she’s on the board of this left-wing private school, Georgetown Day School, about all the radical books, like the Critical Race Theory books, she basically said, well, it’s just like Amy Coney-Barrett, she’s on the board of a private school. So I basically take the same position she had.
And so it was kind of interesting the way Ted Cruz sort of walked her into an ambush where she would say like, well, listen, Critical Race Theory, I’m vaguely familiar with it.
It’s not really been a part of my judicial philosophy. And then he brings out a quote from a speech where she says being a judge involves all these different influences. One of them is Critical Race Theory.
Leahy: Hey, by the way, that’s a very good point, Neil. Did you get the same impression that I got, that she was not as prepared for these questions as she should have been?
McCabe: Yes, it’s very interesting because I think what she was told was do not engage, and just give these boilerplate answers. But she can’t resist. And the reason why she can’t resist is because she’s probably never been challenged a day in her life.
She’s been so used to adulation and worship and it’s never occurred to her that she couldn’t handle herself. This is the American League East.
You have to hit a real curveball. You have to hit a real fastball. These fastballs come in high and tight. And it’s like, you know, Hawley is not some chump. Ted Cruz is not some chump.
Leahy: Neil, Crom Carmichael has a question for you.
Carmichael: Neil, on the child porn, I did see some sound bites on that. What is it that – did she, as a judge, sent somebody who is convicted of child porn to some very, very small sentence compared to the guidelines? Is that what she actually did?
McCabe: Right. There are federal sentencing guidelines. There were nine cases. In seven of them, she gave a sentence below the guidelines, and in two cases, the minimum. And there was one case, I believe it was Cotton, who was talking about a self-professed drug kingpin where she gave him 20 years.
And in the sentencing thing, she says, I completely regret having to give you 20 years, but I have no choice because of the sentencing guidelines. And then when he came up during COVID and said, hey, listen, I need some relief because of COVID, she says, well, you really don’t qualify for COVID relief on your sentence.
But I will knock seven years off your sentence now that you’re here. And she basically said that it was her prerogative even though Congress specifically said in the First Step Act that its provisions could not be retroactive.
And she went ahead and did it anyway. And it sort of opened up this line of inquiry among Republicans to say, hey, are you just going to do whatever you want?
Leahy: I think the answer is yes.
Carmichael: Yes. Another quick question, and that is when Kavanaugh’s hearing took place, they asked him all kinds of questions about – and I’m not talking about the thing with the fake story about the sexual harassment deal – I’m talking about things like, did you drink beer in high school? What his grades were? Things like this. Didn’t somebody ask her what her LSATs were and she refused to give them?
McCabe: I don’t know if she was asked specifically about her LSAT. I know that Tucker Carlson has been banging the pots and pans over her LSAT scores for about two weeks now. But certainly Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democrat Senator from Rhode Island ,asked Kavanagh, what is the Devil’s Triangle?
(Chuckles) Which is either a drinking game or some game that involves a bizarre combination of intimacy. I’m not really sure what the answer was.
Leahy: Last question for you, Neil. We’re running up against the clock here. Does she get confirmed? What’s the final vote going to be in your guess right now?
McCabe: … She gets in unless they can pick off one of the three or four Democratic senators who’s on the bubble right now.
Leahy: I think Joe Manchin already says he’s actually on the bubble and probably leaning against her.
McCabe: All you need is Manchin, friend.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Ketanji Brown Jackson” by H2rty CC BY-SA 4.0.
