No one expects Ketanji Brown Jackson to be a conservative justice at the Supreme Court. Her confirmation is inevitable, and I would suspect that a bunch of Republicans cross the aisle to confirm her.

But what the Republicans in the hearings have done is fairly expertly proven that Democrats, given the opportunity, are largely willing to flee from far-left rhetoric at this point. Especially when it comes to the Constitution and social issues.

Jackson is having to flee from Critical Race Theory and won’t define what actually constitutes being a “woman”. What’s more, she isn’t going into great detail about when life begins and when in life equal protection applies to a person.

KENNEDY: When does equal protection of the laws attach to a human being?

JACKSON: Well Senator, I believe that the Supreme Court — actually, I actually don’t know the answer to that question, I’m sorry. pic.twitter.com/sVbJFtH6N8

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) March 23, 2022

This comes amid a 13-hour marathon of questioning featuring Democrats praising Jackson’s virtues and qualifications, Republicans getting revenge for the hearings of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and both sides trying to pin her down on key Supreme Court issues. Dan McLaughlin at National Review summarized just how much of a setback the hearing was for progressive jurisprudence.

• She affirmed that “the Supreme Court has established that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right” (although that doesn’t commit her to adhere to that view herself).
• Asked by Chuck Grassley about Justice Stephen Breyer’s tendency to cite international law as a source for interpreting the Constitution, Jackson said that she respectfully disagreed with her former boss, and that international law should not be used to determine the meaning of the Constitution.
• Asked to name a justice whose philosophy resembles her own, she could have named Breyer, but she didn’t, and declined to name one, instead pointing to her own record.
• She has continued to speak movingly about the cops in her family and the role of, and need for, police.
• She talked about how her experience growing up was “completely different” from her parents’ attendance of segregated schools, and she cited “how far we have come” as a sign of “the greatness of America.”
• She agreed with Lindsey Graham that radical Islamist groups are still at war with us, and that the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 (AUMF) is still in effect.
• Asked by Dianne Feinstein about “super-precedent” status for Roe v. Wade, she simply discussed the normal standards for stare decisis and declined to apply any sort of elevated status for Roe. Asked by John Cornyn, she said that she had never heard of a judge describing a case as a “super-precedent.”

Jackson’s hearings are underway at a time when Democrats and Democratic policies are deep underwater among polled voters. Biden’s approval rating still hovers just above 40 percent (his disapproval is pretty consistently over 50 percent). A slew of Democrats are fleeing the House come November. Candidates for state office, like Beto O’Rourke, are begging the Biden team to not come over to campaign for them.

The Democrats’ brand is toxic right now.

When someone is up for confirmation hearings, there are teams of people whose job is solely to prep work. They work to figure out what the Senators might ask (especially Senators on the other side of the aisle) and prep them with carefully crafted statements and rebuttals to get through the toughest of questions. So it’s natural that Jackson would push back on things like Josh Hawley’s assertions about her being too lenient on child pornographers.

But her team either neglected to prepare her for social issues like abortion and transgenderism or they prepped her by teaching her how to side-step those issues. It seems far more likely that it’s the latter.

And that’s because of what I mentioned at the beginning here: Jackson’s confirmation is basically pre-ordained. There is no way the Republicans can block it. They can all line up against her and it would do nothing more than make her confirmation a campaign issue. That’s why I expect there will be a handful of Republicans (particularly those up for re-election this year, if not more) who will vote to confirm her. It takes the issue out of the 2022 election.

But… if you go too far left in your responses to the judicial committee, right now you could find your job depends on the whims of Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin. Under normal circumstances, they might not buck the party, but right now they are feeling pretty emboldened. If they wanted a more “moderate” judicial pick (or if they just wanted to buck the White House again) nothing would stop them, and it would be Democrats who stopped the confirmation of the first black woman to be a Supreme Court justice, not the Republicans.

The Biden team does not want yet another failure, so they had to prep Jackson to make sure she was prepared enough to not give in to any progressive talking point and try to play it as straight down the middle as possible. We know she’ll be a progressive judge. No one has any doubts to that. But she has to make herself out to be less progressive in order to survive this fight, which means that being overly progressive is toxic to the Democrats right now and they know it.