Unit­ed States Supreme Court nom­i­nee Judge Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son has shown the patience of Job and the wis­dom of Solomon dur­ing her Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee hear­ings. She has dis­cussed the law, and her delib­er­a­tions as a judge, with the lucid­i­ty of a skilled edu­ca­tor. The prob­lem is, some in the U.S. Sen­ate nei­ther wish to be edu­cat­ed nor have the capacity.

The com­mit­tee hear­ings have wit­nessed the dog whis­tles of white suprema­cy, wild for­ays into irrel­e­vance, and the kind of raw dem­a­goguery that then-Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee Chair­man James East­land deployed on the first Black Amer­i­cans nom­i­nat­ed to the fed­er­al bench. It was a class­less effort by Repub­li­cans to dis­cred­it a nom­i­nee who embod­ies class.

Wit­ness this exchange: Seek­ing to link Judge Jack­son to Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry, Sen. Ted Cruz, R‑Texas, demand­ed: “Do you agree… that babies are racist?”

He post­ed blown-up images of a book by schol­ar Ibram X. Ken­di, tak­en from the library of a pri­vate school in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., where Judge Jack­son is a board member.

At the end of Monday’s hear­ing, Sen­a­tor Mar­sha Black­burn, R‑Tennessee, went on a riff about trans­gen­der youth and posed this ques­tion: “Can you pro­vide a def­i­n­i­tion of the word woman?”

“No, I can’t,” replied Jack­son, as if it had any bear­ing on judi­cial duties.

“You can’t?” asked Black­burn, one of the Senate’s dimmest bulbs.

“I’m not a biol­o­gist,” said the judge.

As with oth­er riffs, on sub­jects rang­ing from child pornog­ra­phy to antiracism edu­ca­tion, Repub­li­cans were reach­ing to their base.

They were reach­ing low, cod­dling fan­tasies of the far right. There was a nas­ti­ness and ugli­ness on dis­play in the World’s Great­est Delib­er­a­tive Body.

The right’s mouth­pieces and media were stok­ing hate.

Judge Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son (White House photo)

“Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son serve on board of school that pro­motes crit­i­cal race the­o­ry,” ran an FNC head­line. After the Black­burn exchange, Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee chair Ron­na McDaniel sneered on Twit­ter, “Democ­rats have gone from ‘Believe all women’ to ‘We don’t know what a woman is.’”

Jen­nifer Rubin, the con­ser­v­a­tive Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist, summed it up well under the head­line: “Fringe Repub­li­cans are not the prob­lem. It’s the party’s mainstream.”

The writer and thinker Heather Cox Richard­son cit­ed a decade-old paper by Thomas Mann of the Brook­ings Insti­tute and Nor­man Orn­stein of the right-lean­ing Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, which concluded:

The GOP has become an insur­gent out­lier in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. It is ide­o­log­i­cal­ly extreme; scorn­ful of com­pro­mise; unmoved by con­ven­tion­al under­stand­ings of facts, evi­dence and sci­ence; and dis­mis­sive of the legit­i­ma­cy of its polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. When one par­ty moves this far from the main­stream, it makes it near­ly impos­si­ble for the polit­i­cal sys­tem to deal con­struc­tive­ly with the country’s challenges.

(Mann and Orn­stein were writ­ing in 2012. The Repub­li­cans’ nom­i­nee for Pres­i­dent that year, Mitt Rom­ney, is now in the Sen­ate and twice vot­ed to con­vict Don­ald Trump. Rom­ney is now reviled in the par­ty as a Repub­li­can In Name Only.)

Judge Jack­son is a Har­vard Law grad­u­ate, for­mer fed­er­al pub­lic defend­er, clerked at the Supreme Court for the jurist she will replace – Jus­tice Stephen Brey­er – has served nine years as a U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge, and is now on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Dis­trict of Columbia.

She is endorsed by the Fra­ter­nal Order of Police.

She’s even a rel­a­tive by mar­riage of for­mer Repub­li­can House Speak­er Paul Ryan.

Yet, here were Sen­ate Repub­li­cans fan­ning the Q‑Anon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry by charg­ing that Jack­son is “soft” on child sex abuse. Wit­ness this false charge from Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz, R‑Texas: “I believe you care for chil­dren, obvi­ous­ly your chil­dren and oth­er chil­dren. But I also see a record of activism and advo­ca­cy as it con­cerns sex­u­al preda­tors that stems back decades, and that is concerning.”

“Advo­ca­cy?” The absurd charge has been dis­missed as “mer­it­less to the point of dem­a­goguery” by the con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zine Nation­al Review. Yet, it was tak­en up again Wednes­day morn­ing by Sen­a­tor Lind­say Gra­ham, R‑South Car­oli­na, who vot­ed in favor of con­firm­ing Jack­son to the D.C. Court of Appeals.

Judge Jack­son tried to explain what goes into decid­ing such a case, notably sen­tenc­ing guide­lines set down by Con­gress, and penal­ties (e.g. restrict­ed com­put­er use) that stay with a defen­dant long after he/she has done time.

“These are some of the most dif­fi­cult cas­es that a judge has to deal with because we are talk­ing about pic­tures of sex abuse,” she told sen­a­tors. “We are talk­ing about graph­ic descrip­tions that judges have to read and consider.”

Gra­ham strayed from porn to claim that Black con­ser­v­a­tives have been per­se­cut­ed for their views. Kick­ing off his ques­tions on Tues­day, he want­ed to know from Jack­son: “What faith are you, by the way?”

Jack­son is a non-denom­i­na­tion­al Protes­tant, prompt­ing this fol­lowup from Gra­ham: “Could you fair­ly judge a Catholic?” Gra­ham asked Jack­son to rate the impor­tance of her faith “on a scale of one to ten.”

“Sen­a­tor, per­son­al­ly, my faith is very impor­tant, but as you know, there’s no reli­gious test in the Con­sti­tu­tion,” Jack­son replied.

Gra­ham repeat­ed­ly inter­rupt­ed Jack­son, so often that Judi­cia­ry Chair Dick Durbin gave her a chance to respond on Wednes­day when Graham’s time was up. Gra­ham inter­rupt­ed again, and then stormed out of the com­mit­tee hearing.

The Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca will get the Supreme Court Jus­tice it deserves in Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son, the first Black woman ever to be nom­i­nat­ed to the body.

The coun­try deserves bet­ter on Capi­tol Hill.

The Unit­ed States Sen­ate is a linch­pin of the repub­lic, yet in Mar­sha Black­burn, Ted Cruz, Lind­say Gra­ham, Josh Haw­ley and Tom Cot­ton, it is pop­u­lat­ed by some peo­ple who rep­re­sent the dark­er side of the Amer­i­can story.