Sen. Sasse Calls Out ‘Jackassery’ in Senate Moments After Cruz Questioned Ketanji Brown Jackson 

Senator Ben. Sasse (R-NE) called out the “jackassery” in the Senate moments after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) questioned President Joe Biden’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, about her soft sentences for child sex offenders.

Sasse spoke about why cameras should not be allowed in the Supreme Court when he noted that “the jackassery we often see around [the U.S. Senate] is partly because of people looking for short term camera opportunities.”

“Transparency is a good thing. I also believe that pen and pad can facilitate a whole heck of a lot of transparency just fine. And it’s healthy for Americans to recognize the second and third and fourth order effects of cameras,” Sasse said. “A huge part of why this institution doesn’t work well is because we have cameras everywhere.”

Sasse added:

There’s a whole bunch of things that humans can do if they’re not immediately mindful of some distant camera audience that they might be trying to create a sound bite for. And Instagram can be useful for some small things but for intellectual discourse, it is not a friend. And I think we should recognize that the jackassery we often see around here is partly because of people looking for short-term camera opportunities.

Sasse’s comments came shortly after Cruz questioned Jackson about her soft sentences for child sex offenders and her thoughts on womanhood, leading some social media users to speculate whether Sasse’s comments were about Cruz.

One user asked, “Did Sasse just take a shot at the “jackassery” Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham?”

During his questioning of Jackson on Wednesday, Cruz presented a chart highlighting all eight of Jackson’s child porn sentences and noted they deviated from federal sentencing guidelines and what government prosecutors recommended.

Speaking about United States v. Chazin, Cruz asked Jackson:

In this case, you say comparable defendants are sentenced to 84 to 92 months. Sentencing Guidelines by statute require you to have similarly situated defendants sentence to similar sentences, but you don’t sentence Chazin to 84 to 92 months. You sentenced him to 28 months. Why?

Jackson defended her lax sentencing of child sex offenders by saying that she has sentenced over 100 people, and Cruz was only focused on eight cases.

“Senator, no one case can stand in for a judge’s entire sentencing record. I’ve sentence more than 100 people. You have eight or nine cases in that chart,” Jackson said.

Cruz also asked Jackson about assessing womanhood in gender discrimination cases after she failed to define the word “woman” when Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked her on Tuesday. Cruz said:

If I can change my gender if I can be a woman and then an hour later if I decide I’m not a woman anymore, I guess I would lose Article Three standing. Tell me does that same principle apply to other protected characteristics? For example, I’m an Hispanic man could could I decide I was an Asian man, what I have the ability to be an Asian man, and challenge Harvard’s discrimination because I made that decision.

As Cruz’s allotted time concluded, he got into a back-and-forth with Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL), who claimed Cruz was not allowing Jackson to answer the questions.

Cruz, along with his Republican colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee, pushed for Jackson’s pre-sentencing reports on her child sex offender cases in a signed letter sent to Durbin on Tuesday.

Notably missing from the letter’s signature block was Sasse’s signature. A spokesperson for Sasse said that Cruz raised “an important process issue on document production.”

However, the spokesperson added that Sasse is “going to continue to dive into Judge Jackson’s judicial philosophy because, as an originalist, he believes judicial philosophy is the central issue of this nomination.”