'What Supreme Court hearings?' GOP's 2024 hopefuls fail to find a springboard

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson have not provided a springboard for ambitious senators the way Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 hearings did.

Four years ago, when then-President Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Democrats eyeing the White House used the circus-like hearings, featuring accusations of sexual abuse at the height of the #MeToo movement, to elevate their national star.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota launched onto the national stage with her pointed interrogation of Kavanaugh. Trump called California Sen. Kamala Harris’s grilling of the nominee “nasty.” And Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey logged a “Spartacus” moment, releasing highly confidential documents in violation of Senate rules. All three ended up on Democratic presidential debate stages the following year, and Harris made it onto the ticket of eventual nominee Joe Biden.

But the political realities of Biden nominating the first Black woman for the high court, replacing a liberal justice and holding a majority in the evenly split Senate, thanks to Vice President Harris’s tiebreaking vote, have left most Republicans largely listless in these hearings.

“What hearings?” said veteran New Hampshire Republican David Norway. “New Hampshire has 2% unemployment. Folks don’t watch paint dry or congressional hearings in the normal course of business.”

It wasn’t for a lack of trying from the would-be 2024 contenders filling the Senate Judiciary Committee, however.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., got the jump on the pack days before the hearings started by tweeting a series of accusations that Jackson had been “too lenient” in sentencing child sex offenders. He pressed the case through this week’s hearings. (“This is the first time you’ve seen him in the news since Jan. 6,” said one Republican operative, noting that Hawley is trying to live down the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, when he famously raised his fist in support of the Trump supporters who sacked the Capitol.)

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who has been raising eyebrows with trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, caught some attention with her opening line of questioning focused on Jackson’s “secret personal agenda.” After her opening statement Monday, a third Republican operative texted that she looked like vice presidential material for a possible Trump ticket in 2024.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, scored a viral moment with a giant blow-up of Ibram X. Kendi’s book “Antiracist Baby,” accusing Jackson of pushing “critical race theory” at the elite Georgetown Day School. Jackson, who is on the school’s board, said she did not know if critical race theory — an academic approach to analyzing the racial implications of laws that has nothing to do with how one raises a baby — was being taught there, noting that the board does not vet school curricula. (Private school boards are mainly tasked with fundraising.)

“It will not matter at the end of the day, but he was brilliant and now has strong talking points for GOP primary voters,” said Scott Reed, a longtime Republican operative who ran Bob Dole’s campaign for president in 1996.

After Cruz’s moment went viral, Kendi’s book shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, showing that the opponents these senators vilify can also benefit from the attention.

Trump himself — whose proclamations are one of the best barometers of whether an issue is registering on the right — sat this battle out. Instead, he spent the week relitigating his 2020 election loss and even his 2016 victory.

Other 2024 Republican hopefuls largely kept their distance as well. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has emerged as perhaps the clearest counterweight in the party to his former boss, stayed out of the fray this week. Even in Jackson’s home state of Florida, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has polled well as the strongest alternative to Trump in 2024 on the right, had nothing to say about her this week.

At the outset of the hearings, Senate Republican leadership charted a path of largely avoiding attacks on Jackson directly, telling her she would not be treated as poorly as Kavanaugh was.

“Republicans are spending a lot of time not hitting Jackson but reminding their colleagues at how ‘unfair’ the hearings for previous nominees are,” said Republican pollster Michael Cohen (not the same person as the former Trump lawyer). “It’s a realization that Jackson is going to get confirmed and that attacking a historic pick is not great politics.”

But that tactic, of trying to avoid direct attacks on the nominee, didn’t last long as 2024 hopefuls got their chance at the mic.

Ironically, it was Booker, who does not seem to be a candidate for higher office this time, who brushed off Hawley’s accusation against Jackson — which was deemed "misleading" by the Washington Post's Fact Checker columnist Glenn Kessler — in one of the most viral speeches from the hearing.

“And so I have to sit here saying nobody's stealing my joy. Nobody's gonna make me angry,” Booker said, referring to Hawley’s line of attack.

He then cited a National Review article that dismantled Hawley’s argument: “Especially not people that are called, at a conservative magazine, demagogic for what they're bringing up. It just doesn’t hold water; I'm not gonna let my joy be stolen.”

Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: J. Scott Applewhite/AP, Alex Brandon/AP, Drew Angerer/Getty Images