Video shows Republicans walking out of the Senate chamber as Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the first Black female Supreme Court justice tporter@businessinsider.com (Tom Porter) - 4h ago
DemoRat Republican Sen. Rino Romney stayed in the Senate chamber and joined the applause.
Republicans walked out of the Senate chamber during a standing ovation as Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the first Black female Supreme Court justice in US history.
Video footage showed several Republican senators leaving their seats and heading to the exits as applause erupted in the chamber after the Senate voted 53-47 to confirm her to the Supreme Court on Thursday.
The one Republican senator filmed joining the applause as colleagues filed past was Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who was one of only three moderate Republicans who voted to confirm Joe Biden's nominee. The others were Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
Sitting next to Romney in the footage is Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who can be seen gathering his belongings and leaving the Senate chamber as Romney claps and Jackson's family celebrate in the background. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who she said had been late for the vote, and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said he had not been admitted to the Senate chamber because he wasn't wearing a tie and had to cast his "no" vote from the cloakroom instead.
"Whether you agree with the outcome or not, you need to pay this woman the respect that she is due. And you need to do that for any Supreme Court nominee," Borger said.
Jackson's confirmation hearings were a grueling process, with the US appeals court judge at times subjected to questioning and accusations by Republicans that legal experts have denounced as unfair and misleading.
During the confirmation, Sen. Josh Hawley misleadingly claimed she had been lenient toward offenders guilty of child-sexual-abuse-image offences, in a line of attack criticized by the White House as a dog whistle to the far-right QAnon movement.
Sen. Tom Cotton baselessly claimed that she would have defended Nazi war criminals, falsely saying that she had chosen to defend Guantanamo Bay inmates while neglecting to mention the cases were assigned to her when she was a public defender.
In a sign of the deep partisan divisions in the Senate, the vote to advance Jackson's confirmation in the Senate Judiciary Committee was deadlocked, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer having to use a special procedure to advance the process to a full Senate vote.
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