• Lindsey Graham said Republicans wouldn't have given Jackson a hearing if they'd held the Senate majority.
  • "If we were in charge, she would not have been before this committee," he declared on Monday.
  • His comments underscore the depth of Republican hostility to Biden's Supreme Court nominee.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina declared on Monday that Republicans would not have held hearings on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court if they held a majority in the Senate.

"If we get back the Senate, and we're in charge of this body, and there's judicial openings, we will talk to our colleagues on the other side," said Graham at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Jackson's nomination. "But if we were in charge, she would not have been before this committee."

"You would've had somebody more moderate than this," he added.

Graham, whose membership on the committee gives him purview over Supreme Court and other judicial nominees, came out early in support of South Carolina federal district judge J. Michelle Childs after President Joe Biden announced he would honor his campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman to replace retiring liberal Justice Stephen Breyer. Graham said he supported Biden's efforts to diversify the high court and publicly praised Childs as his favored rumored contender. 

"Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America," Graham said at the time.

But when Biden chose Jackson instead of Childs, the South Carolina Republican and close confidante of former President Donald Trump claimed that "the radical Left has won President Biden over yet again."

After aggressively questioning Jackson during her confirmation hearings, Graham announced last week that he would oppose her nomination to the high court.

"I will oppose her and I will vote no," Graham said last week. "My decision is based upon her record of judicial activism, flawed sentencing methodology regarding child-pornography cases, and a belief Judge Jackson will not be deterred by the plain meaning of the law when it comes to liberal causes."

This comes after Graham previously voted to confirm Jackson to her current seat on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit just last year. Graham, along with Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, were the only three Republicans to support her confirmation. Collins announced last week that she will vote for Jackson's confirmation to the Supreme Court. Murkowski has not yet said how she will vote.

His comments come years after Senate Republicans notably blocked former President Barack Obama's 2016 nominee Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. Under then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republicans refused to consider Garland's nomination to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The seat was later filled by former President Donald Trump's nominee Neil Gorsuch in 2017. 

Graham, as well as several other Republicans on the panel, grilled Jackson over her sentencing record and her judicial philosophy during her confirmation hearings last month.

Those GOP members accused Jackson of being "soft on crime," seizing on a handful of child-pornography cases in which Jackson imposed shorter sentences than those recommended by the federal guidelines. Legal experts have widely rejected the accusations, saying they lack data that shows Jackson's conduct represents the mainstream and that the sentencing guidelines are outdated and overly severe.

Jackson repeatedly defended her record, telling the senators that "nothing could be further from the truth" in response to the allegations that she's lenient toward child-pornography offenders.

Republicans like Graham also balked at Jackson's judicial philosophy, which she described as a "methodology" that involves taking a neutral position, review both sides of the case, and apply the law to the facts of the case. 

Graham also spent time during the hearings rehashing the heated 2018 confirmation battle for Trump's nominee Brett Kavanaugh, which grew increasingly partisan after Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault. 

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