Turley Advances Nonsense About Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson To Appease His Racist Fanbase
Judge Jackson lacks the experience Turley needs to divine a judicial philosophy... assuming you just ignore all the experience.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (Photo by H2rty via Wikimedia Commons)
You really have to hand it to Jonathan Turley.
The GWU Law professor has developed a refined sense of exactly how far he can bait the frothing at the mouth bigots lapping up his every appearance without saying anything explicitly reprehensible himself. He’s just asking questions! He’d say the same thing about any nominee!
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It’s a lie, of course. He wouldn’t say this stuff about any nominee, but he has a knack for making it seem like he could say this about any nominee. Which allows him to preserve the cloak of independence as a talking head that right-wingers crave as an ethos. It sounds twice as convincing when they can secure their dose of confirmation bias from someone ostensibly outside the tent.
But he’s inside the tent. And we’re making s’mores later.
Interesting. When Amy Coney Barrett was up for the Supreme Court on the strength of less than three years of judicial experience, Turley made the talk show rounds explaining that her judicial philosophy was abundantly clear. He was even willing to reverse engineer her whole decision-making process:
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And I think that when you look at her work, you’ll see that she tends to go back to these first principles, much like her mentor. In this case Kanter on the Second Amendment, for example, that received a great deal of discussion, I think you really see her methodology. She goes first to those principles and then works back from them.
Because this isn’t really about reading tea leaves when it comes to social security benefits. Turley should be able to break down Judge Jackson’s thoughts on statutory interpretation pretty easily, but this way he gets to stress her “thin” record and feed the conservative metanarrative that she lacks “worthy” experience. It’s “lesser Black women” with a gentler touch. But the goal is the same.
Professor Steve Vladeck who already crunched all the numbers when it comes to judicial experience zeroed in on the subtext here and set the record straight.
But in the interest of not leaving well enough alone, Turley decided to subtweet Vladeck to rehabilitate his claim. The little Turley Tango here is that he’s not objecting to her length of experience, he’s just dismissing huge chunks of her experience for not giving him enough to divine her judicial approach. Again, it’s not the length of experience, it’s the worth of that experience.
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Which, again, is exactly what his audience wants to hear.
The only generous read of this is that her trial court experience does nothing to illuminate her judicial philosophy and that Turley is only judging her on her year on the D.C. Circuit. The problem with that read is that you can absolutely learn a lot about a judge from trial court opinions. Especially on contentious calls that end up generating detailed appellate records. Which Turley absolutely knows.
And, again, Turley knew everything he needed to know about Amy Coney Barrett off 2.9 years of appellate service. He’s not talking about “her views on specific thorny constitutional questions” that may not have arisen yet in her tenure, he’s saying she doesn’t have enough experience for him to figure out her “judicial philosophy.” That’s laughable.
But the best part about this retort is that Professor Vladeck… PRE-EMPTED IT.
It’s not. It’s a lot of opinions.
That tweet went up FIVE HOURS before Turley’s response. And it was the first reply to the original tweet Turley’s talking about.
But that’s the value of the subtweet: he’s hoping no one bothers to look up the Vladeck thread and just takes him at his word that it’s “bizarre.” Poison the well and move on.
The point is, Turley’s really got this down to a science. He’s rooted out the nub of what the “lesser Black women” crowd wants to hear and figured out how to pitch it with an air of detached observation. Everyone who points out that the emperor is naked is peddling “bizarre spin.” He’ll get his social media juice and a nice invite down to the cable news studio and all he had to do was lend his waning credibility to the narrative that the lengthy resume of a Black woman just can’t possibly be good enough.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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