Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday during a Senate floor speech that he would not support President Biden's choice for U.S. Supreme Court.
McConnell said that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson lacked candor and wasn't clear enough in her answers to Republicans' questions about court-packing, abortion and other topics during two days of questioning, with Tuesday's hearing running more than 12 hours. McConnell said that he went into the Senate hearings with an "open mind."
"After studying the nominee’s record and watching her performance this week, I cannot and will not support Judge Jackson for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court," McConnell said.
.@LeaderMcConnell: "I cannot and will not support Judge Jackson for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court." pic.twitter.com/iWkSBAmJmT
— CSPAN (@cspan) March 24, 2022
"Finally, I heard that Democrats held a press conference yesterday to complain that Republican questions were too tough. Of course, nobody could have less credibility to police the fine details of confirmation hearings than our Democratic colleagues on the Judiciary Committee. The last 48 hours were a dry and friendly legal seminar compared to the circus that Democrats inflicted on the country just a few years back," McConnell said alluding to the confirmation process of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
McConnell wrote in a statement posted to Facebook, "If the nominee had a paper trail on constitutional issues, perhaps it could reassure us. But she doesn’t. When Justice Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court, he’d written more than 200 circuit court opinions that Senators could study. Justice Kavanaugh had written more than 300. Justice Barrett outpaced them both. She wrote almost 100 appellate opinions in just three years, plus years of scholarship as a star professor that Senators could examine. Judge Jackson has been on the D.C. Circuit for less than one year. She has published only two opinions."
