Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall says he’ll vote no on Ketanji Brown Jackson for Supreme Court
Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall said Friday that he will not be voting in favor of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, making it increasingly clear that Democrats will need to rely on their narrow majority to confirm the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Marshall adopted a line of argument, first raised by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley at this week’s confirmation hearings, that he found Jackson “soft on crime” and was troubled by her sentencing of child pornography offenders.
Legal experts say Jackson’s sentencing history is within the norm for federal judges.
“I believe she will rubber stamp Biden’s far-left agenda instead of protecting the Constitution and our Kansas values. There is no way I can in good faith support her to be an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court,” Marshall said in a statement.
Unlike Hawley, Marshall is not on the Senate Judiciary Committee and will not be able to vote on Jackson’s nomination until it reaches the floor of the Senate, which likely won’t take place for two weeks.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said Friday he would support Jackson, meaning Democrats likely have the 50 votes they need to confirm her.
It is unlikely any of Kansas and Missouri’s four senators will be among them. All four of them voted against her nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2021.
Hawley said Thursday he will not support Jackson. He set the tone of the hearings by accusing Jackson leniency toward child pornography offenders. It was an argument most often seen in election campaigns against candidates for positions like state Attorney General or a judge to a state’s highest court.
Outdated federal guidelines have caused judges across the country to issue lower-than-recommended sentences for child pornography crimes that don’t involve the creation of images. Hawley found seven cases involving child pornography offenders where Jackson issued a sentence lower than both the guidelines and the prosecutor’s request.
A letter by three legal experts, including Frank Bowman at the University of Missouri, questioned Hawley’s argument that she should have been issuing the sentence prosecutors wanted every time.
“This is a puzzling criticism on its face inasmuch as it suggests that the task of a judge passing sentence is not to make an independent determination of the most appropriate penalty for crime... but rather to rubber-stamp the recommendations of the government,” they wrote.
While Hawley and Marshall have made their stance official, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran and Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt have not said how they will vote.
Blunt said Wednesday he wanted to see that Jackson intends to “be a judge and not a legislator,” a line often employed by Republicans who would like to see more conservative justices on the court.
“I think what I said early is still my view that I’d certainly be pleased to vote for the first black woman to go on the court,” Blunt said. “But what happens in the hearings will be and should be the most important element of that.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2022 at 10:34 AM.