Graham rails against Dems at committee meeting in voicing opposition to Jackson nomination

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The Senate Judiciary Committee met Monday to discuss and hold a vote on President Biden's Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., emphatically stated that he would not support her despite his past votes for Democratic appointments.

Graham has voted to confirm nearly all of Biden's judicial nominees, and he explained that Jackson is too far to the left for him to continue that trend.

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"I'm inclined to vote for judges of the other side, but this choice of Judge Jackson was really embraced by the most radical people in the Democratic movement to the exclusion of everybody else,," Graham said. "After four days of hearings and hearings, I now know why the left likes her so much."

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Graham said there were other, more moderate candidates who would have met Biden's stated criteria of being Black and female, and that these judges could have garnered some Republican support.

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"The White House didn't go down that road because it feels they must pick somebody that's more appealing to the hard left," Graham said. "They made that choice and we'll see how it plays out."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., questions Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Graham specifically criticized Jackson over a case in which she ruled against the Trump administration's expansion of the use of expedited removal of illegal immigrants. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that decision, using emphatic language to state that the law clearly gave the administration this power.

"Well, she took the plain meaning of the statute, set it aside, did legal gymnastics to basically issue a temporary injunction. That to me says everything I need to know about how she's going to govern," Graham said. "She's wants an outcome. She's going to find it.  She’s going to get it. Activist to the core."

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Graham noted that Jackson is the first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court, but claimed that this is only because when it was believed that Judge Janice Rogers Brown was on a short list for a Supreme Court seat in 2005, then-Senator Joe Biden said that if she was picked it "would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered."

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"That's why Judge Jackson is the first African-American nominee to come before this body to be on the Supreme Court. Because you made it that way," Graham said. "Because when you had a chance to support an African-American conservative, you used her ideology against her. You blocked her from being considered by this committee, and we're supposed to be like trained seals over here clapping when you appoint a liberal. That's not going to work."

"We live in America today where your ideology is held against you if you're a conservative, and when you're a liberal we're supposed to embrace everything about you and not ask hard questions," Graham continued. "That's not the world we're going to live in."