Former RNC chair: GOP attacks on Kentaji Brown Jackson ‘won’t stick’ because they’re ‘not credible’

On Monday, March 21, Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson — President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court — got underway. And some Republican senators, from Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri to Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, have tried to discredit Jackson by claiming that she is soft on crime. But when former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was interviewed by MSNBC’s Ari Melber on March 21, he dismissed those claims as cheap political theatrics.

Melber, himself an attorney, brought Steele on his show “The Beat” along with activist Barbara Arnwine, founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition — and Melber noted that the anti-Jackson view on the far right is that she “loves criminals and wants to make sure they get out of prison right away so they can keep doing crime.”

Steele responded, “It’s all politics…. It’s the ongoing trope…. that this is how you own the libs…. over issues like law and order…. Look, the reality is: There is no hook to hang a hat on when it comes to this particular judge. She is probably the most qualified for this position of any judge that’s been put before the committee in a generation.”

The former RNC chairman went on say that “very little” of the attacks on Jackson from the far right “will stick.”

Steele told Melber and Arnwine, “When you start saying that she…. wants to let child pornographers off, no one believes that because it’s not credible — and it’s already been debunked.”

Melber pointed out that Hawley has been claiming that Jackson is soft on child pornography, adding that the Associated Press and the Washington Post have debunked his claims.

Arnwine commented, “Listen, I thought that Hawley, Blackburn, (Sen. John) Cornyn — they all just appeared to me to be desperate. And they were petty. I thought it was so petty.”