Amy Coney Barrett Wasn’t a Trump Rubber Stamp After All

By David Harsanyi

Wednesday, December 09, 2020

 

The Supreme Court this week rejected a Republican bid to undo the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania. No one on the Court dissented — and “no one” includes the newest associate justice, Amy Coney Barrett.

 

This is somewhat confusing when we consider that one of the central accusations leveled against Barrett by Democrats and liberal pundits was that she would — when not banishing cancer-stricken minority children from hospitals — steal the election for Donald Trump (whose tweets certainly did not help matters).

 

It was not just the typical adjective-laden melodrama from Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern — a “sinister argument from Bush v. Gore returns with a vengeance!” — or from New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who confusingly asserted that Trump’s tweets were a “confession that the Supreme Court has a serious conflict of interest that prevents it from adjudicating any election case fairly.” Barrett had no more a conflict of interest than the justices named by Barack Obama who ruled on issues related to Obamacare, or the dozens of other justices who have adjudicated cases involving the president who nominated them. This was simply another new standard invented by people who are under the impression the system exists solely to buttress their partisan goals.

 

Unable to smear Barrett as a sexual predator or as a cultist, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats were left to either intimate or, often, explicitly accuse Barrett of corrupt behavior. Nearly every senator suggested the judge recuse herself from cases involving Trump, though they had produced not a scintilla of evidence that she had promised him anything or ever betrayed her ethical obligations or judicial philosophy for partisan reasons.

 

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse — who, to be fair, may be off his rocker — alleged that Barrett was a party to some kind of secret corporatist “dark money” quid pro quo arrangement to steal the presidency. “Republicans want to rush Barrett through in time to deliver what could be the key vote on behalf of the president who chose her,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post, where many columnists peddled similar paranoia. Dana Milbank found it “chilling” that Barrett told senators she would “need to hear arguments” before offering an opinion on some far-fetched theoretical scenario concocted by then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein. (Note: Feinstein is no longer in this post, because she wasn’t hard enough on Barrett, by her own colleagues’ standards.)

 

Whenever Republicans nominate justices to fill Supreme Court vacancies, reporters adopt an anxious tone regarding the controversial nature of the nominee and the partisan makeup of the Court. They never seem alarmed by the prospects of liberal judges weakening constitutional protections for their partisan allies — on free speech rights, religious freedoms, and the Second Amendment, or what have you.

 

Without fail, though, they offer appeals to authority. “In light of Trump’s public statements, it will reasonably appear to the public that Trump offered [Amy Coney Barrett] the job with the implicit understanding that just weeks later she would help him keep his,” claimed Stephen Gillers, an “expert on judicial ethics” at New York University Law School in an interview with the Washington Post. An “understanding” implies some consensual acknowledgment. And yet Gillers, who knew well that the president makes many outrageous claims on Twitter, offered no evidence of an existing arrangement. That’s to say nothing of the fact that, if we’re to believe polls, the public believed Barrett should be nominated by a healthy margin.

 

When a Pennsylvania election case ended up deadlocked 4–4 in the Supreme Court in October, Democratic senator Dick Durbin told reporters that it “was a disturbing demonstration of what’s at stake if the Republicans have their way and fill this vacancy.” Some people might find it more disconcerting that a senator — the second-highest-ranking Democratic senator, at that — functions under the assumption that the only virtuous outcomes in the Court are ones that favor Democrats. Then again, the entire case against Barrett was mass projection.

 

We already know that liberals like judges who ignore constitutional rights and rely on “empathy” and race and wealth when making their decisions — basically, undermining every judicial tenet of blind justice. You will notice that every liberal above simply assumes Donald Trump should lose every case he’s involved in, without seeing any evidence or knowing the contours of the dispute. They all demanded that of Barrett publicly, without her seeing a case. So make no mistake: It is Democrats who favor judges who will deliver predetermined partisan outcomes.

 

The next time Republicans nominate a justice, maybe years from now, they too will be tarnished as illegitimate or unethical or criminal — and reporters will dutifully echo whatever accusations are floated by the Left. And one day soon, when Barrett rules against some liberal infringement on individual liberty, Democrats will dust off all these attacks.

 

Then, as is the case now, it will largely amount to cynical political posturing. In reality, it isn’t Barrett’s alleged partisan pliability that bothers them, but rather, the exact opposite: her adherence to originalism, a judicial philosophy that undermines their partisan objectives. After all, the attacks on Barrett say far more about them than they do about her.