For weeks, Black women supporting Jackson’s nomination awaited her confirmation hearing with a mix of excitement and dread, eager to see history being made, but concerned her critics would play into racist and sexist tropes.

“You’ve seen this effort by some of the senators to smear her, and it is hard to watch,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center. “I imagine that women in particular around the country who are watching this are frustrated.”

Graves, who watched Tuesday’s proceedings from inside the hearing room, pointed to a moment during Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s often provocative questioning about race.

“I imagined how I would fare — probably not as well as she — in this situation,” Graves said.

Referring to a children’s book that aims to teach young people about racism, Cruz asked Jackson whether she believes “babies are racist.”

A somber-faced Jackson paused for several seconds, exhaled deeply and appeared to reflect carefully before responding. It was a sigh that resonated with many viewers.

But Blackburn wasn’t trying to be amusing. She was simply repeating the view that has been building for years on the right: that the Supreme Court’s seminal decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized access to birth control, needs to go. But Griswold stands for so much more than birth control — and that’s why Republicans want to see it overturned.

In the 7-2 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, the court recognized for the first time a constitutional “right to privacy,” which it found was violated by the state’s law that made it a crime to encourage people — in this case a married couple — to use birth control. From there, this “right to privacy” would be expanded in later Supreme Court decisions to extend beyond married couples to other personal liberties. Griswold became the building block for other noteworthy Supreme Court cases that much of the GOP disapproves of, from Roe v. Wade in 1973 to the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision that ruled state laws banning “homosexual sodomy” were unconstitutional to the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The courts in these landmark cases expressly relied on the Griswold court's recognition of a “right to privacy” in reaching their decisions. In Lawrence, for example, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in explaining the court’s rationale that “the most pertinent beginning point is our decision in Griswold.” From there, Kennedy explained that “the reasoning of Griswold could not be confined to the protection of rights of married adults,” thus invalidating “a Texas statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct.”