Jimmy Kimmel continued his observations Wednesday of the ongoing confirmation hearings for Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. And as he’s done most of the week, he specifically focused on the lines of questioning from Republican senators, or as Kimmel put it, the “3-ring circle jerk.”
“You know it was another day of grandstanding, speechmaking and hissy fitting in the Senate today,” Kimmel said at the start of his monologue. “It was day three of the confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. 58% of Americans support Judge Jackson’s appointment to the Supreme Court. It is the most support a Jackson has had since Thriller came out.”
“She has said that the fact that she was even nominated shows how far we’ve come as a country,” Kimmel continued, “and so some of the Republican Senators on the committee have been hard at work to show how far we haven’t.”
“Three of them in particular — Hawley, Graham and Cruz — have been putting on a three ring circle jerk this week, desperately trying to get a sound bite that might make it onto Fox News. Unfortunately for them, they’ve made it here instead,” Kimmel said.
“Josh Hawley of Missouri has been working hard to insinuate that Judge Jackson, a Harvard-educated, 51-year-old mother of two daughters is somehow cool with child pornography,” Kimmel said. “They’ve been beating this drum for three full days now until finally Dick Durbin, who is the chair of the Judiciary Committee, had enough.”
Kimmel then played a clip of Durbin pointing out, as we did last night, that Hawley has on multiple occasions supported judges with records essentially identical to Jackson’s. The clip ended with Hawley looking very frustrated.
“And at that moment, for the first time in his life Josh Hawley realized that he sucks.” Kimmel quipped.
“Dick Durbin isn’t the only Dick on the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Kimmel said as he moved on. “No Republican has been more hot and bothered than Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who promised he wouldn’t make this into a circus, and then picked up right where Hawley left off.”
Kimmel played a rather uncomfortable-to-watch clip of Lindsey Graham saying “If you’re listening to my voice today and you’re on a computer looking at child pornography and you get caught, I hope your sentence is enhanced because the computer and the internet is feeding the beast here.”
“How sexually defective do you have to be to be listening to Lindsey Graham’s voice and watching child pornography at the same time? It’s the scariest dual monitor setup imaginable,” Kimmel joked.
“The award for most original question of the week so far goes to Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Who is the only Republican woman on the Judiciary committee, and yet, is still trying to figure out what that word means,” Kimmel continued.
Then Kimmel played a clip from Tuesday, when Blackburn tried to derail the hearings by asking Jackson to “provide a definition for the word ‘woman.’” Jackson, clearly amused by the tangent, said she couldn’t because she isn’t a biologist. Blackburn then tried to misrepresent Jackson’s response as her being afraid of controversy.
“Hold on, I know the answer,” Kimmel butted in. “You are a horrible woman.”
Kimmel then moved on to talking about “Cancun Cruz,” obviously a reference to the winter of 2021, when Ted Cruz took a vacation to Mexico while his constituents in Texas were being battered by a winter storm, millions of whom were without power. Cruz then lied repeatedly about doing this, including attempting to blame his own daughters.
“He loves talking at these things and he really wants to know what a woman is too,” Kimmel joked before running a clip of Cruz smugly and falsely claiming Jackson is “the only Supreme Court nominee in history who is unable” to define what a woman is.
“Yeah she’s also the only one in history who’s been asked that disgusting question,” Kimmel interjected.
Then Kimmel played another clip of “sweaty Teddy” asking Jackson a question: “If I decide right now that I’m a woman, then apparently I’m a woman, does that mean I would have article 3 standing to challenge a gender-based restriction?”
“No, it means you would be the world’s ugliest woman. It means you would be a woman,” Kimmel joked, adding, “What a slug of a human being.”
Watch the whole thing above.