Judge, interrupted- POLITICO

Happy Friday, rulers! Did you watch the 24-hour job interview on live TV this week? It was something. Special thanks to Maya Parthasarathy for helping to put together this newsletter.

There were plenty of cringe-worthy questions posed this week to federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Supreme Court nomination confirmation hearings.

Discussions about her upbringing and how she juggles work and parenthood are part of the familiar territory that women must navigate — issues that generally don’t come up with men. But it was the persistent interrupting by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz that was most uncomfortable to watch. The two Republicans peppered Jackson with questions and talked over her as she tried to respond.

“It’s not a new phenomenon but seeing it on this stage when we’re talking about a Supreme Court justice really emphasizes the insidiousness of that behavior,” Sharmili Majmudar, executive VP of policy at Women Employed, a nonprofit advocacy group in Chicago, told Women Rule.

You couldn’t help but be reminded of the 2020 vice presidential debate, when Kamala Harris, another accomplished Black woman, had to say “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking. If you don’t mind letting me finish, then we can have a conversation.”

Jackson is in a different position than Harris was that night. Jackson isn’t competing with the senators, only responding as part of her job interview. She held her tongue and kept her patience, which also is familiar territory for women.

“Women being interrupted by men in the workplace has been an ongoing area of conflict and an area that is a behavioral representation of workplaces that have difficulty truly including women or other groups that are under-represented or lack power in the hierarchy,” says Majmudar. “In many ways it’s a power play. It’s about what status do you see yourself as versus the person you’re interrupting. In some cases, it’s conscious and in other cases its unconscious bias being reinforced through this behavior of interruption.”

She pointed all the way back to a UC Santa Barbara study from the 1970s, which found that men were responsible for 47 of the 48 interruptions during conversations analyzed for that study.

More recent research shows Jackson’s experience during the nomination hearings could be a prelude to what she would experience on the high court. A study conducted at Northwestern University law school revealed female justices of the Supreme Court are three times more likely to be interrupted by men during oral arguments than male justices.

And a 2019 study of gender dynamics in Congress shows women are more likely than men to be interrupted during committee work, especially Senate committees. “We see a similar pattern for rapid-fire ‘interruption clusters,’ an aggressive form of interruption,” the authors wrote.

They’re microaggressions experienced by women across the political and corporate spectrum, and especially by women of color.

Congresswoman Robin Kelly, who’s served in Congress a decade and is vice chair of the Energy & Commerce Committee and sits on the Committee on Oversight and Reform, says she’s been in plenty of meetings over the years where she’s been “interrupted, talked over or said something that isn’t heard until a man says it later.”

For the most part she feels it’s not always intentional and she recognizes it has a lot to do with “how you were raised.” She says “sometimes when someone’s rude, it doesn’t necessarily have to do with me being female.”

Still, she adds, the confrontations seen during the Supreme Court hearings might not happen if “there were more of us [women] in the room, more of us at the table, and more at the head table. That’s how things change.”

Anita Shelton, who heads DC Women in Politics, a bipartisan group that works to elect women candidates up and down the ticket, sees the interruptions Jackson sat through as just one part of the inherent racial bias that was part of the hearings.

“We wouldn’t expect anything more from some of them. And others just don’t realize that their comments are openly disparaging and with a racial bent,” Shelton says, pointing to questions about Jackson’s upbringing and comments that her parents must be proud. “That’s all nice but it’s a disparity. They seem surprised that we would have an African American woman who has a typical family.”

It’s about Jackson making sure senators feel comfortable with her, Rhonda Briggins, co-founder of Vote Run Lead, says of the high court nominee talking about her upbringing and raising children. “Men are never required to do that. Men have not had to talk about family life in that way. When women work, people want to ask, ‘Where are your children?’ So in order to not have that line of questioning, we put it out there before people bring it up.”

“Cursing senators, judicial philosophy and document demands: 5 takeaways from Jackson hearing,” by Josh Gerstein for POLITICO: “Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson faced round after round of Republican attacks on Wednesday in questioning that may create video clips for potential Republican presidential candidates but didn’t shed much new light on her judicial record.

“Jackson’s confidence seemed to grow over the course of her second day of questioning, with the nominee sometimes pushing back against a handful of GOP senators who read out graphic details of child pornography cases she’d handled as a judge, accusing her of being too lenient on the offenders. Senate Democrats reiterated that Jackson’s sentencing record was in line with that of other federal judges appointed by both Republicans and Democrats.

“At the end of a 10-hour day, Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) decried some of his Republican colleagues for being, as he put it, ‘just vicious in their attacks.’

“‘There was a promise that they’d treat her with respect. Obviously, a couple of my colleagues didn’t get the memo,’ Durbin said.”

“Madeleine Albright, first female secretary of State, dies at 84,” by David Cohen for POLITICO: “Madeleine Albright, a refugee from both Nazi Germany and Soviet communism who became the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of State, died on Wednesday. She was 84.

“A statement from her family said the cause was cancer, and that she was surrounded by friends and family. The statement recounted Albright’s journey to public office, in which she ‘rose to the heights of American policy-making.’ She was a ‘tireless champion of democracy and human rights,’ her family said.

“As the world rearranged itself after the Cold War, Albright was a major figure in international diplomacy as President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations and later his secretary of State.

“‘As the first woman to serve as America’s top diplomat,’ President Barack Obama said when presenting her with the Medal of Freedom in 2012, ‘Madeleine’s courage and toughness helped bring peace to the Balkans and paved the way for progress in some of the most unstable corners of the world.’”

Read more here.

“Oklahoma’s House passes a near-total abortion ban,” by Mariel Padilla for The 19th: “Oklahoma’s state House on Tuesday voted 78-19 to pass a near complete ban on abortions, legislation that far surpasses Texas’ six-week ban. The bill is now headed to the Senate and, if passed, will be the strictest anti-abortion bill in the country.

“The legislation — known as House Bill 4327 — bars a physician from performing or inducing an abortion at any point in the pregnancy unless it is ‘to save the life’ of the pregnant person. Similar to Texas’ six-week abortion ban, the new legislation would allow private citizens to pursue civil actions of up to $10,000 against anyone who performs or ‘aids and abets in the provision of such an abortion.’ Lawmakers added an emergency clause for timing so that if the bill is signed into law, it would take effect immediately.

“‘Abortion rights activists have been warning of this nightmare for months: These bounty hunter laws will have a domino effect across the country, as more and more states ban abortion entirely while Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land,’ Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement.

“But Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that established a right to an abortion up until a fetus can live independently outside the womb, could be overturned as soon as this summer. The Supreme Court is expected to rule by June in a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. While the case ostensibly concerns a 15-week ban passed in Mississippi, the nine justices have been asked to consider whether Roe was wrongly decided and should be overturned entirely. Legal observers expect a conservative majority will issue a decision that either weakens or undoes the Roe v. Wade protection.”

“Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in the Washington Post: “Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

“The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results. …

“The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be ‘the lead and the face’ of Trump’s legal team.”

“Utah governor vetoes transgender athlete bill, citing high suicide rates: ‘I want them to live,’” by Anne Branigin for the Washington Post: “Utah Gov. Spencer Cox became the second Republican governor in the past week to veto a bill that would have barred transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, writing an impassioned letter to state GOP leaders on Tuesday explaining his decision.

“Cox cited ‘fundamental flaws’ in the legislation, known as H.B. 11. But chief among the governor’s concerns were the mental health impacts such a bill could have on transgender youths in the state, he wrote. Cox’s decision to veto the bill highlights divisions within the Republican Party on the efficacy and morality of bills restricting the lives of young trans people. GOP leaders in Utah said they plan to override Cox’s veto, which would require approval from two-thirds of the state’s lawmakers.

“In Cox’s letter, which was also posted on Twitter, the governor cited several reasons he was going against H.B. 11. He raised concerns about substantial last-minute changes to the bill’s content; the potential economic and legal backlash; and a ‘broad misunderstanding’ around the participation of transgender youth in sports.

“But what ‘most impacted’ Cox’s decision were the implications the bill could have on the mental health of trans youths, he wrote, citing two striking numbers: 86 percent of trans youth have reported suicidality and 56 percent have reported a suicide attempt, a 2020 study found.”

“Women Face a Double Disadvantage in the Hybrid Workplace,” by Martine Haas for Harvard Business Review … “A Novel and the Fight for Transgender Rights in Argentina,” by Graciela Mochkofsky for the New Yorker

Read more here.

Elisa Catalano Ewers has started as the Middle East and North Africa lead for Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She was formerly an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank. … Shelly O’Neill Stoneman has been appointed by SecDef Austin to serve as the new chair of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services and lead its restoration, per the Pentagon. She succeeds retired Air Force Gen. Janet C. Wolfenbarger. … (h/t Nat Sec Daily)

Elizabeth Lopez-Sandoval is now comms adviser for USAID. She most recently was comms and special projects director for Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas). … Andrea Porwoll is now comms director for the House Administration GOP. She most recently was communications director for Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.). … Meghan DiMuzio is now senior director of corporate reputation in the D.C. office of Anheuser-Busch. She previously was SVP at Forbes Tate Partners. … (h/t Playbook)