Tell Ted Cruz to be quiet and he’ll insinuate that you’re part of a scheme to hide the truth about the sexual abuse of children from the American public. Durbin answered, “I just want you to play by the rules.” He tried to recognize Senator Chris Coons, but Cruz kept at it-“You can bang it as loud as you want!”-with each sentence he directed at Durbin seeming to move to a more accusatory, more conspiratorial, and more irresponsible level: “You don’t want her to answer that question?” “Why do you not want the American people to know what happened in the Stewart case, or any of these cases?” and “Apparently, you are very afraid of the American people hearing the answer to that question.” “I know you don’t like this line of questioning,” he said. Cruz gestured as if to wave him away, and demanded more time. That was the situation when Senator Dick Durbin, the committee chair, banged his gavel.

He wasn’t getting anywhere-perhaps because Jackson’s sentencing record is not, in fact, radical or outside the mainstream, and also because she had done a good job of standing up to him-but that didn’t stop his hectoring. He had brought a chart, with several of the cases listed, on which he made various calculations. (Since there are twenty-two committee members, that added up to a marathon.) Cruz had used his time to wave in the air children’s books on a reading list at the private school that one of Jackson’s daughters attends, and where the judge sits on the board, demanding to know whether she thinks “that babies are racist” asking her to speculate about whether he could sue Harvard if he were to “decide I was an Asian man” and, most of all, to claim that he had discerned a disturbing “pattern” in the sentences that Jackson had handed down, as a federal judge, in cases involving child pornography.

Each member of the Judiciary Committee had been given a ten-minute opening statement, a half hour to ask questions in a first round, and twenty minutes more in a second. It was Wednesday, the third day of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court, and Senator Ted Cruz had finally run out of time.

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