“With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Ted Cruz confirmed on Thursday that he and his family flew down to Cancun, Mexico, as millions of Texans are without heat and power due to blackouts caused by freezing weather in the state.Īfter initially staying mum on the subject as Twitter sleuths and other passengers shared photographs of what appeared to be Cruz and his family on a plane to Cancun, Cruz said his family “lost heat and power too” but went on the trip because his daughters wanted to go. And their questioning has shown that matters of the court are hardly the first things on their minds.Texas Sen. Perhaps Tuesday’s performances will win Hawley, Cotton, and Cruz voters in a future Republican presidential primary, but they are unlikely to dent Jackson’s prospects of elevation to the high court. Sentencing Commission found that judges gave these nonproduction child-porn offenders sentences below the guideline range 70 percent of the time. As the Post reported, “A 2010 survey showed 71 percent of judges said the mandatory minimums for receipt of images were too high.” Further, a 2021 report by the U.S. As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker noted, it is a widespread view in the judiciary that these sentencing guidelines are too harsh and judges often depart from them. McCarthy, wrote in National Review that he would oppose Jackson on many grounds, “but the implication that she has a soft spot for ‘sex offenders’ who ‘prey on children’ because she argued against a severe mandatory-minimum prison sentence for the receipt and distribution of pornographic images is a smear.” As McCarthy noted, those mandatory minimums have not been updated in more than a decade, and even the most hardened prosecutors often argue for leniency for younger perpetrators, as did Jackson, because of the nature of the crime and the distorted nature of the current guidelines. A conservative former prosecutor, Andrew C. Trump Went Further Than He Ever Had on Three Big Conspiracy Theories in His Latest Social Media MeltdownĪgain, this line of attack-later echoed by Hawley and Cotton-was misleading. Mar-a-Lago Filing Shows Merrick Garland Must Move Quickly to Indict Trump The Most Ridiculous Part of Jared Kushner’s New White House Memoir Have the Facts Finally Caught Up to Donald Trump? One line of attack-the QAnon-whistling suggestion that Jackson is soft on child predators-has previously been refuted by the conservative National Review as a “smear” that is “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” Cruz also spent significant time on “critical race theory,” distorting aspects of the judge’s record in a way that turned the hearing into a culture-war spectacle. Cruz, Cotton, and Hawley spent their rounds of questioning theatrically fearmongering around pet issues that animate the conservative base. It’s relevant that these are the three most high-profile Republicans on the committee with future presidential aspirations. Some of the GOP’s questioners lived up to that standard, but there were three notable exceptions: Sens. On Monday, Jackson was promised a “respectful” and “dignified” hearing from Senate Republicans. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson faced hours of questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the second day of her confirmation hearings to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.
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