Former President Donald Trump told thousands of supporters in Commerce, Georgia, on Saturday night that if Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson cannot define “woman,” she cannot interpret the plain language of the Constitution.
Trump was reacting to Judge Jackson’s bizarre refusal to define the word “woman” in her confirmation hearings last week at the Senate Judiciary Committee to define the word “woman” when asked to do so by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).
Though Judge Jackson claimed to be something of an originalist, who looks to the plain meaning of words in the Constitution and the law before making her own interpretation, her refusal to define a common word suggested otherwise.
Trump told his audience:
The left has become so extreme that we now have a justice being nominated to the Supreme Court who testified, under oath, that she cannot say what a woman is. If she can’t even say what a woman is, how on earth can she be trusted to say what the Constitution is?
[Applause]
And a party that’s unwilling to admit that men and women are biologically different, in defiance of all scientific and human history, is a party that should not be anywhere near the levers of power in the United States of America.
[Cheers]
Judge Jackson told Sen. Blackburn that she could not define “woman” because she is not a biologist, though the likelier reason was to preserve fluidity in her opinion in the event that she ruled on cases involving transgenderism.
Byron York of the Washington Examiner noted that the context for Blackburn’s question was an earlier line of questioning about the famous Virginia Military Institute case United States v. Virginia (1996), which integrated that institution. The majority opinion in that case, written by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, used the word “woman” throughout the judgment.
Judge Jackson appeared to be unfamiliar with the case, shocking some of the legal experts watching her confirmation hearing, York wrote.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.