Illinois senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has gaveled in the hearing for a second day of questions.
Laying out the process, he said the committee will kick off with two senators, Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who have their 30-minute round of questions. Then they will move to their second round of questions. Each senator on the committee will have 20 minutes.
Durbin began by giving an opening statement rebutting many of the accusations made by Republicans against Jackson, specifically that she is “soft on crime”.
“For many of the senators, yesterday was an opportunity to showcase talking points for the November election,” he said. “For example, all Democrats are soft in crime, therefore, this nominee must be soft on crime.”
He pointed to her support from a police union and the law enforcement officers in her family. He also sought to forcefully rebut the accusation that she is out of the mainstream in the way she sentences child sex crime offenders, an issue raised by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a Republican widely believed to be interested in running for president.
“Our nomination turned out to be a testing ground for conspiracy theories and culture war theories,” Durbin said. “The more bizarre the charges against you and your family, the more I understand the social media scoreboard lit up yesterday. I’m sorry that we have to go through this. These are not theories that are in the mainstream of America. But they have been presented here as such.”
When he finished speaking, senator John Cornyn, a Republican of Texas, jumped in to accuse Durbin of “editorializing” each time a member of the opposing party asked a question. On Tuesday, Durbin, in his capacity as chairman, would follow up on several Republicans’ lines of questioning with context or fact-checks, which irked Cornyn and other members on the committee.
“It’s called chairman’s time,” Durbin said.
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