By Xavier Bisits
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
When Senate Democrats began to participate in Judge Amy
Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings on Monday, the Affordable Care Act was
front and center. According to Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Barrett
“has signaled in the judicial equivalent of all caps that she believes the
Affordable Care Act must go.” In earlier comments, Senate minority leader Chuck
Schumer argued she would “vote to eliminate health care for millions.” And
although Senate Democrats have been more guarded in their language, Democratic
activists haven’t held back in describing her as an arch-conservative. (Per
Occupy Democrats, a popular Facebook page, she is a “far-right Handmaid’s Tale
wacko.”)
As a Democrat, however, I want to make the unexplored
liberal case for her confirmation. Is she a progressive in the traditional
sense of the word? No. Are there good liberal reasons for supporting her
nomination? Absolutely. One can accept these reasons, even while acknowledging
Republican hypocrisy on this issue. (Merrick Garland shouldn’t have been denied
a hearing, and as Democrats we shouldn’t fight fire with fire by doing the
same.)
First, it’s important to understand that Barrett has no
apparent agenda to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As others have
pointed out, this assertion relies on a handful of sentences in a 10,000-word
article in which Barrett discusses whether the concept of “judicial restraint”
can be applied to the Roberts Court. Barrett has never ruled on the ACA,
Medicaid, or Medicare; nor has she expressed any clear public opinions on this
topic. Although she would be likely to rule on a pending challenge to the ACA,
this case hinges on a wholly different and far less persuasive criticism from
the one she addressed in 2017. Attempting to predict her vote is a fool’s
errand.
There are also positive liberal reasons to support her
nomination. Most important, all evidence points to Barrett being a strong
advocate for disability rights. Laura Wolk, the first blind woman to clerk at
the Supreme Court, describes how Professor Barrett responded
to her raising accessibility issues at Notre Dame: “Laura, this is not your
problem anymore. It’s mine.” We should laud any nominee who has demonstrated a
keen awareness that the onus for making environments accessible shouldn’t fall
on disabled people. As the mother of a child with Down Syndrome, she has ruled
in favor of cases around disability rights, including a 2018 case in which she
restored Social Security benefits to a woman who had been unfairly denied them
by an administrative-law judge.
Likewise, Barrett has proven herself willing to rule in
favor of plaintiffs claiming race- and sex-based discrimination. In 2018, she
ruled in favor of a butcher claiming sexual and racial harassment by male
colleagues. That same year, she ruled in favor of a woman seeking back pay from
Costco after she took unpaid leave in the face of sexual harassment from a male
customer. This year, she upheld a ruling in favor of a park supervisor
discriminated against on the basis of being Hispanic. Although much has been
made of her 2019 decision to throw out a sexual-assault conviction, this
reflects more of a concern with due process, rather than a willful ignorance of
the need to uphold decisions affecting civil rights. The claim that she will be
an unmitigated threat to “civil rights” is unfounded.
Finally, Barrett has shown skepticism of the powers
sometimes claimed by law enforcement. This is an important consideration given
the tendency of some other judges to apply overly broad exemptions to police
officers accused of racist police brutality. The
Week describes how her jurisprudence tends to “reach conclusions that
are less deferential to law enforcement.” These decisions include one from 2018
and two from 2019 in which she criticized common police search tactics. Her
conscience is also clearly disturbed by the death penalty. Rather than
interpreting this as an admission of religious bias, we should appreciate her
obvious discomfort with the power of the state being used to harm its own
citizens.
Of course, the most important argument, as well as the
one least persuasive to most progressives, is that all liberals should decry Roe
vs. Wade. Yet even progressives who fail to see the right to life as a
social-justice issue should prioritize democracy over judicial fiat. Everyone
knows that the “penumbras” of Roe vs. Wade are based on judicial
figments of the imagination rather than constitutional fact. Even Ruth
Bader Ginsburg acknowledged that Roe went too far.
The sheer arrogance of those who prefer to keep this
issue out of democratically elected legislatures is an appalling stain on
American liberalism.
One would hope that Barrett’s exceptional qualifications
would be enough to persuade any liberal. But the evidence for Amy Coney Barrett
being an arch-conservative is flimsy at best.
Democrats should vote to confirm her.
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