Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has been nominated to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Several Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee hope to be nominated for President by the Republican Party.

Their questions for Judge Jackson were directed more to the Republican base than to her.

Thanks to Senator Ben Cardin, I attended an hour of Judge Jackson’s nomination hearing this afternoon.

When she was asked provocative questions about controversial legal issues or about issues that are very unlikely to come before the Supreme Court, such as critical race theory by Senator Cruz, her answers were very brief.

She seemed to find her voice when queried by Senator Amy Klobuchar.

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Hearings for Supreme Court nominees were not always this way.

When Thurgood Marshall was nominated by President Lyndon Johnson to be the first Black on the Supreme Court, Senator James Eastland, chair of the Judiciary Committee and an arch segregationist, asked him, “Are you prejudiced against white people in the South?”

Justice Marshall responded, “Not at all. I was brought up, what I would say way up South in Baltimore.  I don’t know, with the possible exception of one person that I have any feeling about them.”