Supreme Court nominee wins debate students’ vote
As Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson fielded questions during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a discerning group was watching and listening – speech and debate students across the country.
They knew that Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the nation’s highest court, credits part of her success in life and the law to her speech and debate team training decades ago in Florida at Miami Palmetto Senior High School.
Amid the Senate Judiciary Committee’s expected Monday decision to send Jackson’s nomination to the full Senate for final consideration, the students offered rave reviews to the way the judge handled earlier nomination hearing questions about her sentencings in child pornography cases, gender and critical race theory.
“I think she came out unscathed, and inspired people who were really listening to what she had to say,” said Cameron Kettles, 18, a top debater and senior at the Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, a Dallas suburb.
She cited Jackson’s repeated explanation of the federal sentencing guidelines and many other factors a judge weighs before imposing criminal sentences. Jackson recited them again and again when Sens. Ted Cruz, Rtexas; Josh Hawley, R-MO.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Tom Cotton, Rark., argued the punishments she’d meted out had been too lenient.
“It didn’t seem like they cared what she wanted to say,” Kettles said. “The only thing you can do in that situation is sticking with what you have said.”
Alanalee Hughes, 16, is a junior at Walter Panas High School, part of the Lakeland School District, roughly 47 miles north of New York City. She agreed with Jackson’s responses.
“The way we’ve been taught to handle something like that is to bring it back to the point we’re trying to make, and then clarify it,” Hughes said.
Miles Wang, 17, a senior and communications major at the A.W. Dreyfoos
School of Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida, applauded Jackson’s suggestion that consulting a biologist might be in order when Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-tenn., asked how the judge would define a woman.
“She tried to bring it back to what was pertinent to the matter at hand, her judicial qualifications,” Wang said.
“It would be very easy to entrap yourself if you gave an actual answer to a question like that,” Hughes added.
The students spoke from years of debating experience.
Kettles said she started in third grade. Five years later, she debated the pros and cons of plea bargains in criminal courts. Jackson wrote her Harvard University undergraduate thesis on that same subject. Kettles is scheduled to join Harvard’s class of 2026 in late summer.
Hughes has been debating for three years. The Senate committee’s protocol, in which an equally divided group of senators from the two major political parties questioned Jackson, doesn’t mirror speech and debate formats. However, Hughes said cross-examinations in tournaments often involve questions “to try to throw you off.”
Wang’s debating start came in seventh grade, and he has competed in multiple international competitions for U.S. teams. He’s now weighing plans at colleges including Harvard and Princeton.