On the third day of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., drew the ire of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., for a line of questioning that Leahy later called “outrageous.”
Leahy is a longtime, influential member of the committee, having served as its former chair and now as president pro tempore of the Senate. He has backed Jackson’s nomination to the bench from the start.
Going beyond his allotted 20 minutes, Graham interrupted Jackson several times as she attempted to answer his questions on her past sentences given as a judge as well as her opinion on the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Eventually, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, interjected, telling Graham to let Jackson speak.
Leahy’s spokesperson David Carle told VTDigger that Leahy was so angered by Graham that he left the room to talk with reporters in the hallway.
According to accounts from several Capitol Hill journalists, Leahy was visibly angry and said Graham was “badgering” Jackson and that his behavior was “beyond the pale.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve been here 48 years,” Leahy told CSPAN. “Here we have a highly respected and respectable nominee, and to be treated that way — I don’t know what the motivation might be, what the political motivation is — but to see the badgering of this woman as she’s trying to testify, I thought it was outrageous.”
Later Wednesday afternoon, when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, attempted to speak out of order, Leahy interjected: “I know the junior senator from Texas likes to get on television, but most of us have been here a long time, trying to follow the rules.”
At the conclusion of his own time for questioning Wednesday, Leahy offered Jackson “an opportunity to speak directly to the American people, including in my home state of Vermont.”
In response, Jackson — who, if confirmed, would be the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court — told the committee her parents grew up under lawful segregation in Florida. By the time she was born in 1970, “my reality growing up in Florida, and my parents’ reality growing up in Florida, was like night and day,” she said.
“And so what my being here I think is about, at some level, is about the progress that we’ve made in this country in a very short period of time,” she said. “I would say it seems like a long time, but in one generation, we’ve gone from the reality of my parents’ upbringing to the reality of mine. And I do consider myself, having been born in 1970, to be the first generation to benefit from the civil rights movement … so that people like me could have an opportunity to be sitting here before you today.”
