Grassley Statement at an Executive Business Meeting

 

We have six judicial nominees and one executive nominee on the agenda today. We’re requesting that all of the nominees be held over.

 

I will have more to say next week, but I wanted to briefly address the nomination of Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court.

 

Democrats have taken to repeatedly mentioning that Judge Jackson has been confirmed by the Senate three times, two of which were non-controversial. Using votes for positions like the United States Sentencing Commission is going to make it much harder to confirm anyone to those positions. It encourages senators to apply the same standard used for evaluating Supreme Court nominations to every single position.

 

If Democrats had applied the approach they want Republicans to use now, that would be one thing. But we know they haven’t. Democrats have voted against nominees who were confirmed unanimously for the circuit court. President Biden did it four times as a senator. Ten other Democrats in the Senate now have done the same thing for more than one nominee. Hopefully Democrats will think hard before continuing down this road.

 

Unfortunately, Judge Jackson’s record is incomplete. That’s because information has been withheld. We’re missing all of Judge Jackson’s non-public sentencing commission documents. The Obama White House held back 48,000 pages of documents. We also received an unconfirmed chart of probation sentences for 14 cases from Judge Jackson and the White House that Democrats have attempted to use to defend her record. 

 

And, as far as the further inquiries go about how the nominee handled child exploitation cases, we’re looking at her record. That’s what we’re supposed to do. It appears the White House wants to hide that record.

 

So, with so much information withheld, we’ve examined her record. There were a lot of questions about Judge Jackson’s judicial philosophy. One senator on the other side noted that he didn’t think he’d ever heard a nominee get so many questions on the topic.

 

Apparently it’s been conveniently forgotten by Democrats that it was their current leader, Senator Schumer, who first publicly made judicial philosophy a primary reason for opposing nominees two decades ago. That’s when the Democrats filibustered the first black female to the D.C. Circuit. And, that was Janice Rogers Brown, who could have been the first female black Supreme Court nominee, if Democrats hadn’t so vehemently opposed her.