During her Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Ketanji Brown Jackson was adroitly eloquent at saying nothing, especially about her judicial philosophy. And why not? Hiding her progressive views behind the semantics of judicial judo keeps the confirmation math in her favor.
If she gets a simple majority when the full Senate votes in April, she’ll become the first black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. Which, in the grand scheme of things, means absolutely nothing except to the screechy subculture of liberal elites who congratulate each other while ignoring the real problems of black life in troubled neighborhoods.
But, OK, box checked. The high court is about to get its first squad member – for life. What now? More of the same, of course.
We’ve had the first black president (twice), the first black female vice president, the first black mayor of New York, black secretaries of state, defense secretary, ambassadors, senators, governors, congresspeople, police chiefs, attorneys, astronauts, athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs. Still, the problems that focusing on “the firsts” are supposed to help solve, have only gotten worse. Especially when it comes to crime.
Journalist and former a Chicago Yellow Cab driver Matt Rosenberg lived in that city for 30 years. He wrote about the current crime epidemic in his column Spiraling Violence in Chicago: Causes and Solutions, published in the latest issue of Hillsdale College’s newsletter, Imprimis.
While murders nationwide in 2020 rose to 29.5 percent, Rosenberg wrote – the largest annual increase since the FBI began tracking them since the ‘60s – Chicago’s murders in the same year increased by 55 percent. The crime rate was actually declining until progressives nationwide, after the George Floyd riots, starting pushing to defund the police and to reform the criminal justice system to achieve “social justice.”
And it wasn’t just murder. Shootings were up 63 percent to 3,561 incidents. Expressway shootings were up from 51 in 2019, to 130 in 2020, to 273 in 2021. Carjackings were up, 1,836 of them, a whopping 204 percent between 2019 and 2021.
“Gangs have stoked the carnage with a sub-genre of hip hop music called ‘Chicago Drill,’” he wrote. “Rival gangs call each other out in Chicago Drill raps, and bullets often fly as a result.”
Worse, felony gun violations and young men who commit “overtly violent felonies” are often released due to low-cash or no-cash bail reform.
“Easy probation has become a license to kill,” he wrote. “Why won’t judges properly assess risks, even in juvenile cases? The answer is all too clear: Criminal justice has morphed into what advocates on the bench and in prosecutors’ offices describe as ‘social justice.’ But where is the justice for the victims and their families? The rush to empty out jails and prisons is costing lives.”
Rosenberg’s solution, shockingly, was not to appoint the “first black” this or that as distant role models for the young blacks wreaking havoc in their neighborhoods. It was to repeal the woke legislation that emboldened the criminals in the first place, and to stop ignoring the chronic breakdown of the nuclear family that produces “generational gang life.”
“According to City of Chicago data,” he wrote, “in every year from 1999 to 2009, more than 80 percent of all black women who gave birth were single … More broken homes are directly correlated with more violent crime.”
What screamed through the tea leaves during Judge Jackson’s coached performance last week was her latent advocacy for the very woke policies that are wreaking havoc in places like New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and especially Chicago.
During the hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley asked Jackson about a large number of child porn cases where she sentenced offenders below the prosecution’s recommendation.
Hawley focused on United States v. Hawkins, a case where 18-year-old Wesley Hawkins uploaded videos to YouTube of children engaged in graphic sex acts (some sadomasochistic), with one as young as 8.
Concerned about lenient sentences, Congress set mandatory guidelines in the law for child porn cases. The guidelines in this case required sentencing between 97 to 121 months. The liberal prosecutor in the case asked for two years. Jackson sentenced Hawkins to 3 months, then apologized for having done so.
“This is a truly difficult situation,” Hawley said, directly quoting Jackson after the sentencing. “I appreciate that your family is in the audience. I feel so sorry for them and for you, and for the anguish this has caused all of you. I feel terrible about the collateral consequences of this conviction… Sex offenders are truly shunned in our society.”
Rosenberg asked what we’ve all been thinking: “Where is the justice for victims and their families?”
As the media and the left roll out the red carpet for yet another “first black,” it’s impossible to pretend not to see the wrecked lives in broken neighborhoods that they sweep under that carpet. It’s long past time that the country gets away from skin color and focus on dismantling crippling woke laws and policies that are not only destroying neighborhoods, but the country.
Democrats don’t care about black people; they just want to keep blacks locked in a slave mentality to get and keep power. Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers Brown would’ve been celebrated if exploiting race for power were just about color. It’s about liberal/leftist ideology – woke ideology. Race is just tactic in a larger strategy. It’s a double-whammy in Jackson’s case. She’s a black woman – intersectional kryptonite to force politicians to walk on eggshells. I’m relieved a few Republicans walked hard enough in last week’s hearings to unearth clues about her judicial philosophy beyond her skin color.
Even though she tried to dance around it, Judge Jackson is woke – in alliance with a philosophy and system that falsifies racial and American history to dismantle the country’s institutions from within. And they are dead serious about it.
Not one Republican should vote for her.
“The woke cannot love America because it is not perfect,” said Judge Janice Rogers Brown in a speech at The Federalist Society’s 2020 National Lawyers Convention where she criticized “woke supremacy.”
“We cannot compromise with any system who’s objective is our destruction,” she said. “This is not just a difference of opinion. The question is whether the regime of freedom that was founded here, can survive the relentless enmity of the slave mentality. The spirit of American liberty, a creed dedicated to limited government, free men, and free markets, represents the only anti-utopian tradition to survive in modern times.”
Well said. No wonder Joe Biden and Barack Obama spent years blocking this black woman’s nomination to the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.