WATCH LIVE: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Supreme Court confirmation hearings — Day 3

The third day of confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, are expected to begin Wednesday morning.

The event is scheduled to start on Wednesday, March 23 at 9 a.m. ET. Watch the hearing in the player above.

Jackson forcefully defended her record as a federal judge Tuesday, pushing back against Republican assertions that she was soft on crime  and declaring she would rule as an “independent jurist” if confirmed as the first Black woman on the high court.

Republicans aggressively questioned Jackson on the sentences she has handed down to sex offenders in her nine years as a judge, her advocacy on behalf of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, her thoughts on critical race theory and even her religious views. At one point, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas read from children’s books that he said are taught at her teenage daughter’s school.

Several GOP senators grilled her on her child pornography sentences, arguing they were lighter than federal guidelines recommended. She responded that she based the sentences on many factors, not just the guidelines, and said some of the cases had given her nightmares.

Could her rulings have endangered children? “As a mother and a judge,” she said, “nothing could be further from the truth.”

In what Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., described as “a trial by ordeal,” Jackson attempted to answer GOP concerns and also highlight the empathetic style that she has frequently described when she is handing down sentences. The committee’s Republicans, several of whom have their eyes on the presidency, tried to brand her — and Democrats in general — as soft on crime, an emerging theme in GOP midterm election campaigns.

Jackson told the committee that her brother and two uncles served as police officers, and that “crime and the effect on the community, and the need for law enforcement — those are not abstract concepts or political slogans to me.”

Tuesday’s hearing was the first of two days of questioning after Jackson and the 22 members of the panel gave opening statements on Monday. On Thursday, the committee will hear from legal experts before an eventual vote to move her nomination to the Senate floor.