The confirmation hearings for future Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett is done and over, as if there was ever any point to it. Barrett, like all the jurists with extreme, out-of-the-mainstream views, was well-coached on the art of concealment on a wide variety of topics. She dodged giving straight answers as to her views by claiming that she couldn’t “prejudge” before she was presented with the arguments of a case, but she would not have been selected by Trump and approved by the far-right unless there was a fare amount of certainty of where her views lie on a number of “hot-button” issues.
Barrett once belonged to a religious outlier called the “People of Praise,” whose teachings are too extreme even for the mainstream Roman Catholic Church to accept. Followers believe in “speaking in tongues,” which is essentially unintelligible gibberish that supposedly is a “divine language” that the speaker has been “inspired” to say despite not knowing what the “words” or “sounds” actually mean. Why anyone would think a person like this should be allowed to tell anyone else how to live their lives is disturbing enough; what is worse, however, is that Barrett refused time and time again to reassure at least Democrats that she wasn’t some kind of fanatic.
For example, when asked by Sen. Kamala Harris if she was aware that Trump was supporting a case in the Supreme Court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, and that he was expecting a justice who would also overturn Roe v. Wade, Barrett incredulously claimed she was not aware of Trump’s view on the ACA and Wade. Harris pointed out that Barrett had written an op-ed critical of Chief Justice John Roberts majority opinion on the constitutionality of ACA. The Guardian had also reported the discovery of an two-page advertisement that was signed by Barrett and her husband and published by the St Joseph County Right to Life--a group that is considered “extreme” for its view that life begins at “fertilization.” The advertisement, among other things, opined that “It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v Wade and restore law that protects the lives of unborn children.” Barrett claimed that she has “no recollection” of the ad, which is clearly a lie but she still insisted that she had “nothing to hide”--just to “obfuscate.”
Obfuscate was all Barrett did during these hearings. When pressed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein if she believed that Medicare was “constitutional,” Barrett incredulously replied that she couldn’t “answer that question in the abstract.” That is the answer of someone who has something to hide. When asked by Amy Klobuchar about outsiders recruiting “poll watchers with special forces experiences" in Minnesota, and after having been read the statute against voter harassment by armed civilians, Barrett would only say it was “inappropriate” for her to express a personal opinion on the matter. She kept falling back on refusing to address “hypothetical” issues.
Some questioners didn’t let her escape so easily. The cagey Barrett was naturally wary of Sen. Harris who had called her out on her lie about her views on the ACA and abortion rights, as seen in this exchange that did not end well for Barrett:
Sen. Kamala Harris: Do you accept that COVID-19 is infectious?
Amy Coney Barrett: Yes, I do accept COVID-19 is infectious...it’s an obvious fact
Harris: Do you accept that smoking causes cancer?
Barrett: I’m not sure exactly where you’re going with this...Yes, every package [of] cigarettes warns that smoking causes cancer.
Harris: And do you believe that climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?
Barrett: You have asked me a series of questions that are completely uncontroversial...and then trying to analogize that to elicit an opinion from me that is on a very contentious matter of public debate and I will not do that. I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial.
Harris: Thank you Judge Barrett. You’ve made your point clear that you believe it’s a debatable point.
It is clear that Barrett was either lying or is an idiot who is uninformed about the issues of the day; We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say the former is the more likely scenario. As I wrote about before, Barrett is one of those “originalists” who uses the fig lead of what the Constitution’s framers “originally” meant as an excuse for their own extremist interpretations, which suggests that there are no “rights” unless they are specifically mentioned in the Constitution, or we must accept the judgment of a time and prejudices that are simply out-of-touch with modern realities.
Barrett insisted that “I apply the law, I follow the law. You make the policy” and that “I am not here on a mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act. I’m just here to apply the law and adhere to the rule of law.” Yet as we saw in her exchange with Sen. Klobuchar, it is not precisely clear if she will apply and follow all the laws, or only the ones she personally agrees with. We have seen how this administration and Justice Department perceives the “rule of law”: authoritarianism, thuggery, indifference to human suffering and using power to attack real and perceived “enemies.” We have seen these past four years the Trump administration trying to tear down every law and rule it can simply out of the most infantile and petty personal reasons. Yet in the face of this, throughout the hearings, Barrett had “no opinion.” Never once did she betray any moral and ethical qualms about what the Trump administration has been doing to degrade the rule of law that she claims she will follow.
One thing we need to be very cognizant of is that on issues like the ACA, abortion rights, gay marriage, DACA, the environment and a host of other policy concerns, the radical “origninalists” stand outside of not only majority public opinion, but history. With Barrett adding a seemingly insurmountable conservative majority, what we see is that the far-right minority has found a way to impose its will on the majority of this country. It remains to be seen just what kind of justice this former disciple of Antonin Scalia will be, but given the extremism of her known beliefs and associations, we may well be advised to expect the worst, as we have seen from the likes of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
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