Highlights from Senate vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, continued to attempt to paint Biden's nominee, and his former Harvard Law School classmate, as an advocate for critical race theory in his questioning. Pulling one book title, Cruz asked if she agrees with kids being taught "that babies are racist."

"When you just testified a minute ago that you didn't know if critical race theory was taught in K through 12, I will confess I find that statement a little hard to reconcile with the public record," Cruz said, going on to raise the fact that Jackson sits on the board of Georgetown Day School in Washington and to allege that school's curriculum was "overflowing with critical race theory."

"Senator, I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or though they are not valued or though they are less than, that they are victims, that they are oppressors," Jackson said.

"I don't believe in any of that, but what I will say is that when you asked me whether or not this was taught in schools -- critical race theory -- my understanding is that critical race theory as an academic theory is taught in law schools and to the extent that you were asking the question, I understood you to be addressing public schools," she continued.

"Georgetown Day School -- just like the religious school that Justice Barrett was on the board of -- is a private school," she noted. (Justice Amy Coney Barrett served for three years on the board of Trinity Schools Inc.).

Refusing to back down, Cruz asked, "So you agree critical theory is taught at Georgetown Day School?"

Jackson replied the board does not control or focus on the curriculum at the school "so I'm actually not sure."

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, began his questioning by noting that he and Judge Jackson have "known each other for a long time" as former classmates at Harvard Law School who also worked together on the Harvard Law Review.

"We were not particularly close, but we were always friendly and cordial," Cruz said.

"We were," Jackson replied.

Cruz went on to take issue with Jackson referencing journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones' "The 1619 Project," which won the Pulitzer Prize and was published in the New York Times, in a speech at the University of Michigan Law School for Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2020.

Jackson said most of the speech focused on Black women in the civil rights moment but one slide referenced Jones' work which she had called "provocative."

"It is not something that I've studied. It doesn't come up in my work," Jackson said. "I was mentioning it because it was, at least at that time, something that was talked about and well-known to the students that I was speaking to at the law school."

Cruz then launched into an attack on critical race theory and asked Jackson to explain what it means -- allowing her the chance to say critical race theory does not have an impact on her work.

"Senator, my understanding is that critical race theory is -- it is an academic theory that is about the ways in which race interacts with various institutions," she said. "It doesn't come up in my work as a judge. It's never something that I've studied or relied on and it wouldn't be something that I would rely on if I was on the Supreme Court."

As public polling in recent years shows deteriorating confidence in the Supreme Court, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked Judge Jackson how she sees her role in maintaining the people's confidence in the judiciary system.

Jackson characterized the issues of public confidence in the court as "crucial."

"That's the key to our legitimacy in our democratic system, and I'm honored to accept the president's nomination, in part, because I know it means so much to so many people. It means a lot to me," she said.

"I am here standing on the shoulders of generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity – from my grandparents who had just a grade school education but instilled in my parents the importance of learning, and my parents, who I've mentioned here many times already, who were first in their families to get to college," she said, as her parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, looked on in the chamber.

"This nomination against this backdrop is significant to a lot of people, and I hope that it will bring confidence -- it will help inspire people to understand that our courts are like them, that our judges are like them doing the work and being a part of our government," she added.

As Republicans attempt to paint Judge Jackson as "soft on crime," Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pressed Biden's nominee on whether she was too lenient in handing down sentences to child pornography offenders.

Jackson disagreed with that characterization and explained why below-guidelines sentences are so widely used: Federal sentencing laws set by Congress dictate that judges look at its sentencing guidelines and impose a sentence "no greater than necessary."

"As I said before, these are horrible cases that involve terrible crimes and the court is looking at all of the evidence consistent with Congress' factors for sentencing," Jackson said. "The court is told that you look at the guidelines but you also look at the nature and circumstances of the offense, the history and characteristics of the offender."

"In most cases, if not all of the cases, the government is asking for a sentence below the guidelines because this guidelines system is not doing the work in this particular case," she added.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission, the bipartisan body created by Congress to set federal sentencing rules, said in its 2021 report that suggested prison terms for defendants convicted of possessing child pornography -- as opposed to producing the materials -- have "been subject to longstanding criticism from stakeholders and has one of the lowest rates of within-guideline range sentences each year."

To make that point, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., following Lee, gave Jackson the opportunity to say whether it surprised her to hear that Republican judges supported have also given out similar sentences in child pornography cases.

"No, senator, it would not surprise me because these cases are horrific, and there's a lot of disparity because of the way the guidelines are operating in this particular area," Jackson said. "But in every case, in every case that I handled involving these terrible crimes, I looked at the law and the facts. I made sure that the victim -- the children's perspectives -- were represented, and I also imposed prison terms and significant, significant supervision and other restrictions on these defendants."