Republicans spent hours this week trying to portray Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as a race extremist and child sex abuse apologist. Late Tuesday night, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican of Tennessee, added another social issue to the list of cultural grievances the GOP is pushing against her in her confirmation hearings: gender, in particular, what makes a woman a woman.
Transgender rights are most outrageous after Republican governors in Indiana and Utah vetoed a ban on biological males from women’s sports in recent days, and transgender swimmer Leah Thomas won a collegiate swimming championship.
Ms. Blackburn called the swimmer late Tuesday evening as Judge Jackson’s first day of questioning drew to a close, then asked, “Can you define the word ‘woman’?”
As she and other judicial candidates before her regularly did, Judge Jackson sidestepped the question as irrelevant to her role in the court, saying, “I’m not a biologist.”
But Ms. Blackburn pressed a point—and a thorny issue.
“The fact that you can’t give me a direct answer to a question as fundamental as a woman highlights the dangers of progressive education that we hear about,” she said. “Just last week, a whole generation of young girls watched as our taxpayer-funded institutions allowed a biological male to compete and be a biological female in the NCAA Swimming Championships. What message do you think this sends to girls who strive to compete and win in sports at the highest level?”
Social issues that inspire Republican voters, especially issues of race, also dominate Republican questioning of Judge Jackson, the first black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Ms. Blackburn’s inclusion of the issue of gender in the hearings was not linked to any particular case before the Supreme Court, or to a decision rendered by the high court in recent years, as is customary in such hearings. Discussion stare decisis it was not.
But that was due to the politics of the upcoming midterm elections. At 11 p.m. Tuesday, the senator’s office sent out an email with the headline: “BLAST: Judge Jackson Can’t Define ‘Woman’.”
Like all day Tuesday, Republican National Committee operatives seized on the last line of social attack on Wednesday morning to amplify Ms. Blackburn’s message.