Democratic senators knocked down Republican efforts to turn an outside legal group into a political bogeyman during confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
GOP senators want to use the hearings to slam the liberal organization Demand Justice as a sinister "dark money" puppet master, as Democrats have done with the conservative Federalist Society, but Democrats pointed out they don't actually coordinate with the group, reported Politico.
“I honestly don’t know that much about them,” said Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If you pick the ACLU, or the [Center for American Progress] those are groups that we’ve worked with. They’re not to us what the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society are to [Republicans]."
Donald Trump pledged during his first campaign to nominate judges and justices approved by the Federalist Society, but Democrats say there's no comparison between that conservative group and Demand Justice.
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“Remind me who they are again?” asked Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) “I can see why Republicans would want to try to create some big bad wolf, but they’re not that big and they’re not that bad. And I don’t think that they’re wolves.”
The group's executive director Brian Fallon called the GOP questions about Demand Justice a "badge of honor," and he agreed that he hoped it would serve as a counterbalance to conservative legal groups like the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network.
“It’s obviously hypocritical for [Republicans] to complain about advocacy groups on the left when all we’re trying to do is catch up to the network of groups that have long been active on the right for the last 40 years,” Fallon said. “But I don’t think it’s successfully done anything to derail or put into question the confirmation prospects for any of the Biden nominees over the last year including Ketanji Brown Jackson.”
