As Blavity previously reported, President Joe Biden has honored his promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court by nominating Federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the nation’s highest judicial body. Jackson possesses an impeccable résumé, with credentials and experience equal to or greater than many of the current justices serving on the court. Republicans have already condemned Biden for promising to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, arguing that he was limiting the pool of potential nominees and thus wouldn’t get the most qualified person for the job. This attack completely ignored the fact that Ronald Reagan promised to appoint a woman in 1980 and that Donald Trump made the same promise in 2020 before nominating Amy Coney Barrett. Now that Biden has picked a nominee who is supremely qualified — pun intended — have Republicans dropped their criticism? No, they haven’t — as my grandmother might say, that would be too much like right. Instead, they’ve attempted to modify the criticism, even if their new complaints don’t make any sense.

Here are five of the most inane attacks that Republicans have aimed at Jackson and her nomination thus far.

1. Jackson’s ivy league education is somehow a bad thing?

CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams took to Twitter to note that Jackson’s credentials, including her two Harvard degrees and years as a judge, are greater than those of current Chief Justice John Roberts.

Normally, these accomplishments would look really good for any nominee. But somehow, Jackson’s impressive educational achievements are being used against her. Ashley Baker, the director for policy at the conservative Committee for Justice, recently tweeted that Jackson’s appointment would make a majority of the Supreme Court justices Ivy League-educated, and that this was a bad thing.

Yes, you read that correctly: Baker is arguing that appointing a Black woman to the Supreme Court for the first time will actually make the court less diverse because she was educated at the nation’s most prestigious college and law school. That’s a very impressive feat of mental gymnastics.

2. Republicans, who rushed through a Supreme Court Nominee, are saying Biden is moving too fast.

Another avenue for attacking Jackson without actually having a reason to do so is to attack the process by which she is being evaluated. Forbes reports that several Republican senators are attempting to slow down the confirmation process. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has requested a “rigorous, exhaustive review” of Jackson before she is confirmed. This is the same McConnell who blocked former President Barack Obama from appointing a justice months before a presidential election but then rushed through former President Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a few weeks before his failed reelection bid.

Other Republican senators are jumping on the “slow things down” bandwagon. John Barrasso, of Wyoming, is arguing that we “cannot afford for this process to be rushed.” In 2020, Barrasso said of Judge Barrett that “I’m proud to support her confirmation to the Supreme Court,” only a month after her nomination. Meanwhile, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee has offered the most creative timing-related objection, tweeting that “President Biden’s announcement just days after an unprovoked full scale invasion by Russia is extremely inappropriate.” Blackburn, who supported Trump when he was impeached for interfering with aid meant to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia, is now trying to blame Biden for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and attacking Jackson in the process is a bonus for her.

3. Conservatives are painting differences in political opinions as biases.

Kelly Shackelford, CEO of the conservative religious organization First Liberty Institute, wrote a scathing op-ed against Jackson’s appointment that was posted to the Fox News website. The substance of his criticisms seem to be that Jackson has consistently advocated for and ruled in favor of abortion rights. Opposing Jackson on this issue is not surprising for a conservative organization; in recent decades, judges’ stances on abortion have become de facto litmus tests for both parties.

But Shackelford does not simply state a disagreement with Jackson’s legal views on abortion and other issues; he instead tries to paint her as biased. “According to her record as both an attorney and a judge,” Shackelford writes, “Jackson lacks the dispassionate and unbiased disposition that Americans expect of Supreme Court Justices.” Taking policy disagreements and repackaging them as character flaws is a way to discredit a candidate that is hard to attack directly.

4. Tucker Carlson compares Jackson’s nomination to “Rwanda” for some reason.

On Friday, sentient cesspool Tucker Carlson commented on Jackson’s nomination. He framed his segment as a criticism against Biden for choosing a nominee “on the basis of their appearance.” “Maybe she’s great, that’s not the point,” said Carlson. He then went on to not-so-subtly shade Jackson with all kinds of insults and dog whistles. He pointed out that she had been “an appellate judge for less than a year.” This attempt to discredit Jackson ignores that Jackson “actually had more experience as a judge than four of the people who are currently on the Supreme Court,” as Sen. Amy Klobuchar recently noted to a different Fox News reporter. Carlson continued to throw petty shade and racist dog whistles, criticizing Jackson’s “judicial record, or lack thereof,” saying that she “isn’t much of a jurist” and accusing her of being “ignorant of the law.”

But Carlson’s most head-scratching moment came when, in the process of criticizing Jackson for presumably supporting affirmative action, he claimed that a majority of people polled by Fox News “think that you should be elevated in America based on what you do, based on the choices you make, not on how you’re born, not on your DNA, because that’s Rwanda.” Given that Carlson almost certainly doesn’t know more than one fact about Rwanda, this is no doubt a reference to that country’s 1994 genocide. Comparing the nomination of a highly qualified judge to one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century is nonsensical and a low blow, even for Tucker Carlson. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin rightly called the segment “the perfect distillation of white supremacy.”

5. Republicans, who refuse to cooperate with Biden, are mad that Biden won’t listen to them.

Despite the harsh and disingenuous attacks being waged against Biden for choosing Jackson and against Jackson for, well, existing, conservatives are simultaneously mad because the president didn’t consult them first before making his choice. Conservative columnist W. James Antle III criticized Biden’s choice as an attack against bipartisanship, a principle that the president is supposed to practice even if the opposite party does not.

He points out how the two Republican senators from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, wanted Biden to pick a different nominee: native South Carolinian Michelle Childs. While Childs would have been a great choice as well, Biden going with someone else was not an example of Democrats trying to “ram through as much as they can while they still have their majorities,” as Antle accuses. If anything, it is, however, an acknowledgement that Republicans have no interest in actually cooperating with Biden or Democrats, regardless of the compromises Democrats make to try to win GOP support.

Despite these various attempts to slow down or discredit Jackson’s confirmation, the Democratic majority in the Senate makes it likely that she will be confirmed even without Republican support. Biden has indicated he wants to move quickly, so we are likely to see movement on the nomination — as well as continued GOP attacks — soon.