In the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that indicates the court could overturn Roe v. Wade, some lawmakers have charged that conservative Supreme Court justices led them astray during Senate confirmation hearings. We’ll look at what the three most recent conservative justices had said about Roe.

Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said the way Republican senators treated Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson at last week’s hearings was “disgraceful” and “embarrassing” after they repeatedly brought up her record of sentencing child pornography offenders.  

Manchin said the behavior of GOP colleagues who repeatedly cut off Jackson while she tried to answer their questions about her sentencing decision crossed the line to become inappropriate.  

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is facing a shrinking pool of potential GOP supporters for her Supreme Court confirmation as Republicans harden their opposition.  

Democrats can confirm Jackson without any Republican support if all 50 of their members are united and Vice President Harris breaks a tie. But they are hoping to peel off at least one GOP “yes” vote.  

Though Jackson avoided the type of misstep that would sink her nomination, GOP senators say the hearing did little to win over their members.  

At 2.54pm on the second day of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings that will determine whether she takes a seat on the US supreme court, the solemn proceedings took a nosedive into farce.

Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, turned theatrically to an outsized blow-up of a children’s book, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi. Pointing to a cartoon from its pages of an infant in diapers taking their first walk, he asked Jackson: “Do you agree with this book … that babies are racist?”

When asked whether they agreed with Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) point that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson had imposed very lenient sentences on people possessing child pornography – prison terms far below the federal guidelines and what the prosecutors had requested -- several GOP senators said yes, and they were “very concerned” about a judge who was so soft on people who had committed such vile crimes.

When Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota questioned Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Tuesday afternoon, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont proved they have something in common in addition to being members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Neither of them was in the hearing room.

Yet that did not necessarily make them outliers on the committee.

Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn are all grilling Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson this week. And how many of them will run for president in two years?

“I’d set the line at two,” guessed Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee with the four. “And bet the over.”

US President Joe Biden's Supreme Court pick is taking questions on her career and record from lawmakers on a key Senate panel over the next two days.

If the 22-member Judiciary Committee advances Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination, she will be considered by a vote of the full 100-member Senate.

If confirmed, she would replace liberal Justice Stephen Breyer when he retires at the end of the court term in June.

So the political balance of the court would remain largely the same.

Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson refused Tuesday to weigh in on whether there should be more than nine justices on the high court, a move progressive activists have advocated for in recent years.

“My North Star is the consideration of the proper role of a judge in our constitutional scheme, and in my view, judges should not be speaking into political issues and certainly not a nominee for a position on the Supreme Court,” the nominee told the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Judge Jackson distanced herself from the idea that the meaning of the Constitution evolves over time, characterizing her judicial philosophy as deeply rooted in the meaning of legal texts as originally written.

Mr. Grassley pressed Judge Jackson on whether she believes in the idea of a living Constitution, whose meaning can evolve as society changes over time. That clashes with the approach favored by conservatives, who emphasize the meaning of constitutional provisions at the time they were adopted.