(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration official is steering clear of defining any use by Russia of chemical weapons in Ukraine as a “red line,” a senior administration official told ABC News.

“We learned our lesson” the official said in describing the Obama administration’s ineffective response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons in 2012.

Instead, the administration is considering a new round of economic sanctions against Russia as a potential response should Russia use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, according to a senior administration official.

A senior administration official told ABC News that the U.S. would most likely respond to Russia’s use of chemical and biological weapons “with dramatically stepped-up” sanctions that could target Russia’s gold reserves or Russian leadership.

However, the official noted that developing additional rounds of sanctions might be difficult to put into play given the wide range of international sanctions against Russia that have been put in place since Russia’s invasion.

ABC News has previously reported that the Biden administration and NATO are looking to get chemical and biological detection systems into Ukraine in light of the concerns raised about the possible Russian use of the weapons.

In recent weeks, American officials have expressed concerns that Russia has been preparing a false-flag operation — claiming Ukraine’s use of chemical or biological weapons — that Russia could use as a justification for its use of such weapons.

Following meetings with NATO leaders in Brussels on Thursday, President Joe Biden said the United States would respond to Russia’s use of chemical and biological weapons, but did not lay out specifics for possible responses.

“We would respond if he uses it,” Biden said at a news conference. “The nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use.”

“We are working through contingency planning for a range of different scenarios,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters traveling with the president on Friday. “In broad terms, I believe that there is convergence around the fundamental nature of how the alliance would respond to these issues.”

“Any use of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical, biological, Russia would pay a severe price for the use of those weapons, as the president has previously said,” Sullivan added. “We have spoken to our allies, we’ve done contingency planning within our own government, and we have communicated directly to the Russians.”

The administration also is weighing how it would respond should Russia target the supply lines inside Poland and other NATO countries that are flowing in thousands of American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine’s military.

The administration will most likely pursue a response of “careful reciprocity” to avoid escalation according to the official. Such a response might include the proportional targeting of any Russian weapons system involved in an attack on supplies inside of Poland said the official.

Contemplating a tougher response is tempered by the reality that “everyone knows what that would lead to” said the official.

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(WASHINGTON) — Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson never uttered the word ’empathy’ in nearly 19 hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, but she effectively made clear it’s a hallmark of her style and an asset to judicial credibility.

“My professional experiences, including my work as a public defender and as a trial judge, have instilled in me the importance of having each litigant know that the judge in their case has heard them, whether or not their arguments prevail in court,” she said.

Jackson also insisted it has no influence on her legal decisions.

“I am not importing my personal views or policy preferences,” she told the committee. “The entire exercise is about trying to understand what those who created this policy or this law intended.”

The defense of empathy and impartiality as fully compatible was a defining feature of Jackson’s three days of historic testimony. It also opened a new chapter in a long-running political battle over the importance of a judge’s ability to understand and acknowledge the experiences of opposing parties in a case.

What Judge Jackson and her supporters tout as a selling point, Republican critics call a major liability.

“I’m looking for a justice who will make decisions based on the law, not based on their preferences, not on empathy,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told Jackson this week.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told her, “it seems as though you’re a very kind person and there’s at least a level of empathy that enters into your treatment of a defendant.”

“Maybe beyond what some of us would be comfortable with with respect to administering justice,” Tillis added.

The partisan clash over empathy — which some have dubbed the “Empathy Wars” — has its roots in a campaign promise by Barack Obama more than 15 years ago, when the then presidential candidate made the quality a key criteria for a high court nominee.

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old,” Obama said on a 2007 campaign stop. “And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

Republicans blasted the Obama standard as code for outright bias and weakness on crime, and it dominated the confirmation hearings of Obama high court picks Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, who were both pushed to disavow having “heart” on the bench.

“No sir,” Sotomayor told Republican Sen. Jon Kyl at her hearing in 2009. “I don’t wouldn’t approach the issue of judging the way the president does. It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it’s the law.”

Jackson made clear in her testimony that she agrees; but in subtle ways, she also advanced a belief that impartial judges can empathetically address both victims and defendants, even in cases over heinous crimes.

“My attempts to communicate directly with defendants is about public safety,” Jackson told Tillis, who scrutinized her treatment of child porn offenders, “because most of the people who are incarcerated via the federal system, and even via the state system, will come out, will be a part of our communities again.”

She said directly and holistically addressing a defendant’s experience is aimed at getting the offender to accept responsibility and see more fully the impact of their crimes.

“I was the one in my sentencing practices who explained to those things in an interest of furthering Congress’s direction that we’re supposed to be sentencing people so that they can ultimately be rehabilitated to the benefit of society as a whole,” Jackson said.

Most Republicans were unmoved.

“I just don’t understand why after saying this and believing this, you could give this guy three months in prison,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, who spent the entirety of his time questioning Jackson’s below-guidelines sentence in a child porn case involving an 18-year-old offender. “Do you have anything to add?”

“No, senator,” Jackson shot back.

Having empathy on the high court was once widely considered a vaunted quality. Justice Stephen Breyer, whom Jackson would succeed, called empathy “a crucial quality [to have] in a judge.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said in 2013 that empathy requires “caution” but that cases are “stories about real people” and that judges must understand “real people are going to be bound by what you do.”

Some legal scholars who have studied the impact of empathy on court decision making have found it as a necessary factor for avoiding partiality.

“Empathy matters for judging because judges must expressly and consciously take into account the full positions of the parties, from where the parties stand, to avoid making unconscious and biased judgments,” wrote Rebecca K. Lee in a 2014 Cincinnati Law Review article “Judging Judges: Empathy as the Litmus Test for Impartiality.”

But other jurists take a broader view.

“Wisdom, as opposed to the more narrow empathy, is a foundational requirement throughout our legal system,” said Sarah Isgur, a former Justice Department lawyer and ABC News legal analyst.

“A judicial philosophy may have empathy as one element of it, but it strives to treat similar situations alike by creating a framework to determine which cases are similar and which aren’t,” Isgur said. “Judge Jackson was never able to articulate a judicial philosophy and without one, empathy can actually be the antithesis of justice.”

In a letter to the Judiciary Committee, more than two dozen conservative lawyers who served in GOP administrations or hold right-leaning views hailed Jackson this week, in part because her more than 500 opinions showed an “even-handed” awareness of both sides.

“They have also demonstrated another attribute essential for a judge — a sense of empathy for the situations of others,” the group wrote.

As Jackson heads toward likely confirmation as the nation’s first Black woman justice, her view of the law — and of empathy — could be poised shape the high court for years to come.

“In my capacity as a justice, I would do what I’ve done for the past decade, which is to rule from a position of neutrality, to look carefully at the facts and the circumstances of every case, without any agendas, without any attempt to push the law in one direction or the other,” Jackson said, “and to render rulings that I believe and that I hope that people would have confidence in.”

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(NEW YORK) — A new generation of politicians is emerging just in time for the midterms.

This election cycle marks the first time members of Generation Z, those born after 1996, are eligible to run for seats in the House of Representatives, where legislators must be 25 years old by the time they’re sworn in.

Karoline Leavitt, a Republican from New Hampshire, and Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, are the two main viable Generation Z candidates running for Congress in the 2022 midterms.

Leavitt turns 25 just a few weeks before the New Hampshire primary in August, and Frost turned 25 earlier this year.

Both candidates have some political experience.

Leavitt worked in the Trump administration as an assistant press secretary. Following that, she served as communication director for the No. 3 Republican in the House, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y.

She was raised in New Hampshire and is running in the GOP primary to represent its 1st District, hoping for the chance to go head-to-head against the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Chris Pappas.

“I’m honored to be considered a contender in this primary race to represent my home district and defeat the Democrat, who I obviously feel is not doing a good enough job,” said Leavitt, who has been outspoken about her false belief that Trump won the 2020 election.

Some of Leavitt’s campaign promises include strengthening the Second Amendment, fighting for energy independence, tackling the opioid crisis and advocating for legislation that supports the anti-abortion movement.

“We need young, fresh leadership in Washington on both sides of the aisle,” said Leavitt. “There are politicians that have been [in Washington] literally three times as long as I’ve been alive. This is a serious problem for our country and my generation, [which particularly] lacks young conservative voices.”

Another Gen Z candidate is also running in that crowded race. Tim Baxter, who shares a pro-Trump platform, is struggling to gain traction, however, and had to take out a loan for over $100,000 to continue funding his campaign.

Frost — the Gen Zer running in the Democratic primary for Florida’s 10th Congressional District — was a national organizer for the ACLU and then became the national organizing director of March for Our Lives, a youth-led organization dedicated to ending gun violence.

He’s hoping to fill the open seat of Rep. Val Demmings, who is running for a Senate seat.

Frost said one particular moment cemented his decision to run: being reconnected with his biological mother and having a conversation with her about his birth.

She told him she had him at one of the most vulnerable points in her life, he said, which is when Frost decided to see the world through the eyes of its most vulnerable people.

“I hung up the phone and said, I need to run for Congress, not just for myself, but for people like my biological family, my family, friends, and people who live in central Florida.”

Both Leavitt and Frost agree it’s time to elect young people to Congress to represent issues younger voters care about and to give them more of a say in decisions being made now, which will impact young Americans down the line.

The median age of a senator in Congress is 64, while it’s 58 for members of the House. Nearly two-thirds of Congress is over 55, according to Pew Research.

Leavitt believes it’s crucial for the Republican Party to “encourage young conservative leaders when they come along” while Frost said Generation Z faces unique challenges and the country “needs a diversity of opinions, thoughts, experiences and age” in Congress.

When people tell Leavitt to wait her turn, she said her response is, “for who?”

Frost said he’s had similar experiences with people questioning his age and experience. But he tells them something he picked up from a voter, that he’s “just on time” for a congressional bid.

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