Republicans: getting innocent people released from prison is disqualifying
By 
This exemplifies why hoping Republicans will be open to a civil liberties grand bargain is futile:
In a hearing on Wednesday that was as performative as it was embarrassingly ill-informed, Senate Republicans tried to blame one of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees — Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project who has freed dozens of innocent people from prison — for driving up violent crime across America.
Morrison, 52, is up for a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Of New York. She is the senior litigation counsel at the New York-based Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
She has been lead or co-counsel on cases that have freed more than 30 innocent people from prison and death row.
But Republicans in the Judiciary Committee went after Morrison as if she had committed the crimes that her clients were convicted of — that they didn’t actually commit, either. They tried to blame her for recent spikes in violent crimes in cities, and pressed her on whether she felt guilty about freeing people from prison who had been convicted of violent crimes, glossing over the fact that they had been exonerated by DNA evidence.
“The whole of your record is deeply disturbing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Morrison.
“Across this country, Americans are horrified at skyrocketing crime rates, at skyrocketing homicide rates, at skyrocketing burglary rates, at skyrocketing carjacking rates,” he said. “All of those are the direct result of the policies you’ve spent your entire lifetime advancing.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Morrison he planned to oppose her nomination, along with any other nominees the Biden administration puts forward who are “soft on crime.”
“I will oppose you and anyone else the administration sends to us who do not understand the necessity of the rule of law,” he said.
Remember when people tried to claim that Josh Hawley was some new kind of Republican, when in fact he’s just Tailgunner Ted Cruz in a better-fitting suit and somehow even smarmier? Jesus was that stupid.