A Republican lawmaker is taking aim at President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, after a moment from her confirmation hearing went viral.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) spoke on the House floor where he said to the chair, “Thank you, Person Speaker.”
“I say Person Speaker because I’m not a biologist, and out of respect to our Supreme Court nominee I don’t feel qualified to say Madam Speaker,” he added.
Watch the video below:
Rep. Bob Good: "Thank you, Person Speaker. And I say Person Speaker because I'm not a biologist…" pic.twitter.com/SIWdUn11au
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 31, 2022
Good was opposing an insulin bill, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which the House of Representatives passed on Thursday.
The measure “caps cost-sharing under private health insurance for a month’s supply of selected insulin products at $35 or 25% of a plan’s negotiated price (after any price concessions), whichever is less, beginning in 2023.”
It now goes to the Senate.
Good’s remarks targeting Biden’s Supreme Court nominee refer to a moment during her confirmation hearing when Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked the judge, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
The judge asked, “Can I provide a definition?”
After confirming that was her question, Jackson said, “I can’t.”
She then explained, “Not in this context I’m not a biologist.”
In case you missed it:
Sen. Marsha Blackburn: "Can you provide a definition for the word woman?"
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 23, 2022
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: "I can't. Not in this context. I'm not a biologist." pic.twitter.com/BK1ENBdYcG
Blackburn pressed Jackson, “So, you believe the meaning of the word ‘woman’ is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?”
“Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law and I decide,” the judge claimed.
However, the Republican lawmaker shot back, “The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about.”
Following her comments, USA Today cited “scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology” who agree Jackson’s response was “commendable, though perhaps misleading.”
“There isn’t one single ‘biological’ answer to the definition of a woman. There’s not even a singular biological answer to the question of ‘what is a female,'” Rebecca Jordan-Young, a scientist and gender studies scholar at Barnard College, told USA Today.
The article said, “There are at least six different biological markers of ‘sex’ in the body: genitals, chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive structures, hormone ratios and secondary sex characteristics. None of the six is strictly dichotomous.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) brought up the back-and-forth between Jackson and Blackburn when he said, “Yesterday under questioning from Senator Blackburn, you told her that you couldn’t define what a woman is, that you are not a biologist, which I think you are the only Supreme Court nominee in history who has been unable to answer the question, ‘What is a woman?”
He asked, “Let me ask you as a judge, how would you determine if a plaintiff had Article 3 standing to challenge a gender based rule, regulation, policy without being able to determine what a woman was?”
“I know that I am a woman, I know that Senator Blackburn is a woman,” Jackson said, adding, “And the woman who I admire most in the world is in the room today – my mother.”