Remnick: The nomination process for Ketanji Brown Jackson, although successful in the end, was gruelling and at times extremely ugly. Anita, you faced the Senate Judiciary Committee in your time, during a very different nominating process. What was going through your mind as you watched those hearings?
Hill: Well, first, let me make very clear—I was a witness in a confirmation hearing. Ketanji Brown Jackson was a nominee. I wasn’t surprised that there was an attack on her. I was shocked at the level—or the depths that they would go to—to discredit her. So I think we need to think about the cumulative impact that it has on her as the first African American woman to be nominated for the Supreme Court position, but also the effect that it will have on her and her colleagues, Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan, as they begin leadership of what will be very likely a minority group on the Supreme Court. There’s an even larger impact on the Court itself—the credibility of the Court—and the process for selecting judges was on trial. And I think damage was done to all of those.
Remnick: Jane, you’re a close watcher of the Senate. How has this nomination compared in tone and substance with the hearings prior to it, the hearings for Justice Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett?
Mayer: Well, I found it just strikingly and depressingly familiar, particularly to the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas and the way that Anita Hill was treated. I have to say, that is the echo that I kept hearing in this, and, to some extent, Christine Blasey Ford. As Anita Hill’s saying, these were witnesses, but the salient thing to me was just the demeaning—and, in fact, also an interesting theme to me was that there was a kind of a weird sexualization in all of these attacks, where the women were made to look sort of outside of the norms. In particular, I thought it was interesting that they went after Justice Jackson on her handling of sexual offenders and particularly child-pornography cases, and made her look permissive in some way, as if she was somehow outside of the norms. Anita Hill, way back in the day, was described as “erotomaniac” and described as “nutty” and “slutty” and all these awful things. There were white men who were casting a woman as being somehow dangerous in the sexual area. I found that just depressingly familiar.