First, a correction: Jonathan Turley is a legal scholar with George Washington University, not Georgetown. So when you hear me say “Georgetown,” know I meant GW.

Now that that’s out of the way, I hope you won’t be too distracted to listen to thoughts on the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing, which led to a confirmation flight that is surprisingly close at this point now that Republican Ben Sasse has decided he can’t vote yes.

Brown Jackson is clearly qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice. That’s not really the issue. What shone through during her hearing was a decided lack of committment to a judicial philosophy, something Turley points out eloquently. I’m lifting a lot of it below and hoping he won’t mind.

By the second day of questioning, Jackson’s conflation of philosophy and methodology as synonymous became absolute. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) again pressed Jackson on her refusal to answer this question. Jackson then completely merged the terms (1:33): “I do have a philosophy. My philosophy is my methodology.”

That is linguistically and legally wrong. Jackson described the methodology in mechanical steps of reading the text, applying the facts, and avoiding bias. Thus, she explained, “my judicial philosophy is to rule impartially and to rule consistent with the limitations on my authority as a judge.”

Judicial philosophy encompasses how a jurist approaches the act of interpretation of constitutional or statutory provisions. Even as you mechanically go through the steps described by Judge Jackson, you are still left at some point with interpreting words with contested meaning. There are widely different approaches to how to perform that task and how much importance to put on issues ranging from original intent to textual language to the more general purpose of a given law.

The problem is that that “philosophy/methodology” also happens to be the oath that all judges take to “faithfully and impartially discharge” their judicial duties. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a nominee testifying that she follows a methodology “to rule in a prejudiced fashion and to rule consistent with my personal agenda.”  Literally, every judge embraces that same methodology.

It is akin to a potential client of an investment banker asking what her investment philosophy would be if hired and the banker responding “my philosophy is not to steal the money of clients and use it for my own enjoyment.”

She likely has a philosophy, it’s just not one that’s easy to sell at the moment, so she demurred. And it’s almost certainly tied up with her tendency to sentence defendants in child pornography cases below the minimum standards. The worry, best I can tell, is that KBJ believes in sentencing reform and, in a broader sense, an overhaul of the justice system.

The reason this is a difficult sell is because there has been a rather pronounced uptick in crime in areas that have embraced soft-on-crime tactics due to district attorneys funded by the big — and very rich — players on the philanthropic left.

KBJ also had a strange way of playing dumb when asked direct, yet difficult, questions. She simply said she didn’t know how to define “woman”. Or that she couldn’t say when the law began to apply to a person (because when is a person a person, you see). The most laughably absurd “never heard of it” came when she distanced herself from Critical Race Theory and some of its main proponents. Her actual writings were produced to belie that claim.

There’s still a better than 50 percent chance she’ll be confirmed, and she’s not the worst option from an increasingly strange and radical Democrat party. But her hearing cemented one thing very strongly for me, personally: I’m just really glad Clarence Thomas is feeling better.

I talk about all that on the show today, as well as offer my thoughts on the toe-tapping joy of “Tick, Tick…Boom” (trailer below). There’s also a bit in there about this hilarious article.

Put another dime in the jukebox, baby.

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