Law Justice Amy Coney Barrett Megathread

So the announcer at the rose garden announced her as she walked out with the president.

will find an article soon.

e: he official announced her as his third pick.

e2:

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The long-term academic, appeals court judge and mother of seven was the hot favourite for the Supreme Court seat.

Donald Trump - who as sitting president gets to select nominees - reportedly once said he was "saving her" for this moment: when elderly Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and a vacancy on the nine-member court arose.

It took the president just over a week to fast-track the 48-year-old conservative intellectual into the wings. This is his chance to tip the court make-up even further to the right ahead of the presidential election, when he could lose power.

Barrett's record on gun rights and immigration cases imply she would be as reliable a vote on the right of the court, as Ginsburg was on the left, according to Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University.

"Ginsburg maintained one of the most consistent liberal voting records in the history of the court. Barrett has the same consistency and commitment," he adds. "She is not a work-in-progress like some nominees. She is the ultimate 'deliverable' for conservative votes."

And her vote, alongside a conservative majority, could make the difference for decades ahead, especially on divisive issues such as abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act (the Obama-era health insurance provider).

Barrett's legal opinions and remarks on abortion and gay marriage have made her popular with the religious right, but earned vehement opposition from liberals.

But as a devout Catholic, she has repeatedly insisted her faith does not compromise her work.

Barrett lives in South Bend, Indiana, with her husband, Jesse, a former federal prosecutor who is now with a private firm. The couple have seven children, including two adopted from Haiti. She is the oldest of seven children herself.

Known for her sharp intellect, she studied at the University of Notre Dame's Law School, graduating first in her class, and was a clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in her words, was the "staunchest conservative" on the Supreme Court at the time.

Like her mentor Scalia, she is an originalist, which is a belief that judges should attempt to interpret the words of the Constitution as the authors intended when they were written.

Many liberals oppose that strict approach, saying there must be scope for moving with the times.

Barrett has spent much of her career as a professor at her alma mater, Notre Dame, where she was voted professor of the year multiple times. One of students, Deion Kathawa, who took a class with her earlier this year, told the BBC she was popular because she involved everyone in discussions. He found her "collegial, civil, fair-minded, intellectually sharp, and devoted to the rule of law secured by our Constitution".

Another student told the WBEZ new site: "I feel somewhat conflicted because … she's a great professor. She never brought up politics in her classroom... But I do not agree with her ideologies at all. I don't think she would be good for this country and the Supreme Court."

Barrett was selected by President Trump to serve as a federal appeals court judge in 2017, sitting on the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago. She regularly commutes to the court from her home - more than an hour and half away. The South Bend Tribune once carried an interview from a friend saying she was an early riser, getting up between 04:00 and 05:00. "It's true," says Paolo Carozza, a professor at Notre Dame. "I see her at the gym shortly after then."

Carozza has watched Barrett go from student to teacher to leading judge, and speaks about her effusively. "It's a small, tight-knit community, so I know her socially too. She is ordinary, warm, kind."

A religious man himself, he thinks it is reasonable to question a candidate about whether their beliefs would interfere with their work. "But she has answered those questions forcefully... I fear she is now being reduced to an ideological caricature, and that pains me, knowing what a rich and thoughtful person she is."

Her confirmation hearing for the appeals court seat featured a now-infamous encounter with Senator Dianne Feinstein, who voiced concerns about how her faith could affect her thinking on the law. "The dogma lives loudly within you," said Mrs Feinstein in an accusatory tone. Defiant Catholics adopted the phrase as a tongue-in-cheek slogan on mugs.

Barrett has defended herself on multiple occasions. "I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge," she once said.

However, her links to a particularly conservative Christian faith group, People of Praise, have been much discussed in the US press. LGBT groups have flagged the group's network of schools, which have guidelines stating a belief that sexual relations should only happen between heterosexual married couples.

LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign has voiced strong opposition to Barrett's confirmation, declaring her an "absolute threat to LGBTQ rights".

The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organisation, declined comment on Barrett specifically, but said appointing any new conservative Supreme Court justice would "be devastating for sexual and reproductive health and rights".

To secure the position on the Supreme Court - a lifelong job - Barrett will still have to pass a gruelling confirmation hearing, where Democratic senators are likely to take a tough line, bringing up many of their voters' concerns.

Professor Turley thinks she will take it her stride, due to the "civil and unflappable disposition" she showed during the hostile questioning for the appeals court position.

"She is someone who showed incredible poise and control… her [appeals court] confirmation hearing was a dry run for a Supreme Court confirmation. She has already played in the World Series."

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President Trump on Saturday announced he has chosen Amy Coney Barrett as his pick to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- a move that could significantly shift the nation's highest court to the right if she's confirmed by the Senate.

“Today it is my honor to nominate one of our nation's most brilliant and gifted legal minds to the Supreme Court," Trump said in the Rose Garden alongside Barrett. "She is a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution -- Judge Amy Coney Barrett.”

Trump announced Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, who had been considered by Trump for the vacancy left by the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018. Trump eventually chose now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh instead.

Ginsburg, a liberal trailblazer who was a consistent vote on the court’s liberal wing, died last week at 87. The announcement sets up what is likely to be a fierce confirmation battle as Republicans attempt to confirm Barrett before the election on Nov. 3.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has promised to put the nominee up for a vote, despite the objections of Senate Democrats -- who cite McConnell’s refusal to give Obama nominee Merrick Garland a hearing in 2016.

A source familiar with the process told Fox News that Oct. 12 is the target date for the beginning of confirmation hearings. This means that Barrett, 48, could potentially be confirmed by the end of the month and just days before the election.

Barrett, a former Notre Dame professor and a mother of seven, is a devout Catholic and pro-life -- beliefs that were raised as a problem by Democrats during her 2017 confirmation hearing to her seat on the 7th Circuit.

"The dogma lives loudly within you, and that's of concern," Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told Barrett. She was eventually confirmed 55-43.

Trump was also believed to have been considering candidates including 11th Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa. Trump had said publicly that he had five potential picks he was considering.

A source told Fox News that Trump had taken note of how “tough” Barrett was when she faced the tough confirmation fight in 2017 and had kept her very much at the front of his mind since then.

The source said Trump met her during the considerations on who to replace Kennedy in 2018, talked to a lot of people about her and wanted to keep her in place through the Kavanaugh vetting process in case there was an issue. Kavanaugh did face hurdles in his confirmation battle, but that came after his nomination was announced.

The source said that after Ginsburg died, Barrett was the only candidate he met and spoke with at length, although he made a few calls to Lagoa because some people were pushing him very hard to do so. But ultimately Barrett was always at the front of Trump’s mind to fill a Ginsburg vacancy.

Should she be confirmed, Barrett would be Trump’s third Supreme Court confirmation. That’s more than two-term Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- who each put two justices on the court.

Democrats have vowed to oppose the pick, but the Senate math does not appear to be in their favor. Republicans have 53 Senate seats and Barrett only needs 50 to be confirmed -- with Vice President Mike Pence acting as a tie breaker in such a case.

So far, only Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, have indicated they oppose moving forward with a confirmation before the election. Murkowski has since suggested she still may vote for the nominee.

Fox News' John Roberts, Mike Emanuel and Tyler Olson contributed to this report.

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Ah, SCOTUS stacking, and yet GOPpers have the nerve to get pissy at Democrat court packing. Expect SCOTUS term limits the nanosecond dems get control of senate.

Neither the House nor the Senate can create SCOTUS Term Limits. SCOTUS Lifetime appointment is defined in Article 3. They cant effect the Court by Statute. It requires an Amendment. Which requires 3/4 ratification by the States. The idiots in the Media and Congress pushing this "statute" are crkminally incompetant.
 
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https://twitter.com/chgrimaldi/status/1309968611784691712 (https://archive.vn/PX4wc)

They always tweet this kind of shit and then they can't take the heat.

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This is gonna be a boring thread. There’s not much dems can go after other than muh pro life and pro guns! It‘s a woman that adopted two black kids. She’s a shoein to get the nom.
That's where you're wrong kiddo.jpg

The left's plan of cheating through this election was entirely hinged on RBG staying alive until a Dem was in power. With her death goes their entire plan. They're now backpedaling on the whole "Vote by Mail" idea. This confirmation will produce a ton of salt because the left are entirely helpless as they watch the GOP ram her through. They will pull all the fucking stops to make sure she doesn't get nominated or that Trump doesn't get another nomination. Because if he does, they're entire agenda for the next generation or two goes down the fucking toilet.

And the funniest thing, is that this is all their doing. They're the ones who:
  • passed the law preventing the minority party in the senate from filibustering through a nominee
  • thought 2016 would be a cake walk
  • thought Trump was too toxic for the American public
  • thought Hillary was electable to most of the voting public
  • thought they'd be in power forever and the GOP was dead in the water
  • let the mask slip and show their true colors
Their decisions lead them down this path and created their own hell.
don't call it a grave.gif
 
Not going to lie - I'm pretty nervous about having this candidate up on the high Court. Anyone, and I mean anyone that's higher religious and believes conception starts at sex will be for overturning roe v Wade.

I know it's on humans to be less shitty with unprotected sex but does the world need more disabled people on welfare?
 
All of the miserable harpy spinsters in their Handmaid's Tale costumes, they all glare at ACB with her Aryan beauty, slim figure, United Colors of Benetton ad perfect family, her amazing resume, and her impressive list of accomplishments, and they seethe with rage, because she's everything that they pretend to despise, but she's everything they so desperately want to be, but drinking the progressive Kool Aid ruined their lives, and they know they'll die alone and unloved, and their cats will feast on their corpses.
 
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That's where you're wrong kiddo.jpg

The left's plan of cheating through this election was entirely hinged on RBG staying alive until a Dem was in power. With her death goes their entire plan. They're now backpedaling on the whole "Vote by Mail" idea. This confirmation will produce a ton of salt because the left are entirely helpless as they watch the GOP ram her through. They will pull all the fucking stops to make sure she doesn't get nominated or that Trump doesn't get another nomination. Because if he does, they're entire agenda for the next generation or two goes down the fucking toilet.

And the funniest thing, is that this is all their doing. They're the ones who:
  • passed the law preventing the minority party in the senate from filibustering through a nominee
  • thought 2016 would be a cake walk
  • thought Trump was too toxic for the American public
  • thought Hillary was electable to most of the voting public
  • thought they'd be in power forever and the GOP was dead in the water
  • let the mask slip and show their true colors
Their decisions lead them down this path and created their own hell.

If Trump does win I suspect we'll see Clarence Thomas retire so Trump can pick someone younger, Thomas is 72 so he's not as old as RBG was but he may still want to step down just to secure the seat. There's also Justice Breyer, he's the last Clinton pick left on SCOTUS and he's 82 so he's up there in years though I haven't heard about him having any serious health problems like with RBG and her battles with cancer, he's likely banking on Biden winning so he can step down to give Joe a fresh SCOTUS pick for his seat.
 
Not going to lie - I'm pretty nervous about having this candidate up on the high Court. Anyone, and I mean anyone that's higher religious and believes conception starts at sex will be for overturning roe v Wade.

I know it's on humans to be less shitty with unprotected sex but does the world need more disabled people on welfare?
Was welfare bigger before RvW, or after?
 
That's where you're wrong kiddo.jpg

The left's plan of cheating through this election was entirely hinged on RBG staying alive until a Dem was in power. With her death goes their entire plan. They're now backpedaling on the whole "Vote by Mail" idea. This confirmation will produce a ton of salt because the left are entirely helpless as they watch the GOP ram her through. They will pull all the fucking stops to make sure she doesn't get nominated or that Trump doesn't get another nomination. Because if he does, they're entire agenda for the next generation or two goes down the fucking toilet.

And the funniest thing, is that this is all their doing. They're the ones who:
  • passed the law preventing the minority party in the senate from filibustering through a nominee
  • thought 2016 would be a cake walk
  • thought Trump was too toxic for the American public
  • thought Hillary was electable to most of the voting public
  • thought they'd be in power forever and the GOP was dead in the water
  • let the mask slip and show their true colors
Their decisions lead them down this path and created their own hell.
View attachment 1623723
So what’s the plan? Are they going to drag Christine Ford out to say ACB raped her at a college party?
 
So what’s the plan? Are they going to drag Christine Ford out to say ACB raped her at a college party?
Call her a racist / colonizer for daring to adopt 2 Haitian kids. Say she's a threat to Roe v Wade because she's a Christian and they're usually pro life. Basically shit on her for being religious. This is where we're at. Its already happening.

And if that doesn't work, they'll drag out some dude in need of a paycheck from her alma mater to say she was gropey one time at a college party when they were both drunk. Or drag some high ranking judge's kid out to say he was raped by her during a internship or something of the like.

And if that doesn't work, idk. Maybe they'll say they have a tape of her saying the gamer word at some meeting or say she abuses her adopted kids. Or that she said she'd wanted to kill her tard baby because they're a handful. Or they'll claim she almost aborted her downs kid and call her a hypocrite for even thinking of doing so.

This is like a the superbowl where the left are down by 14 and there's only 30 seconds left on the clock. They'll do anything. People have called for storming the white house. Maybe they'll storm and occupy the Capital and prevent the Senate from ever meeting.
 

LMAO at those ratios.

The left had years to prepare their counter to Barrett. She was already on the shortlist and they knew there was a good chance RBG wouldn't outlive the Trump presidency. The fact that all they have is "white people adopting non-white children is bad when conservatives do it" and "muh Roe v. Wade" is pretty telling. They can't push too hard on the Catholic angle since Biden is nominally Catholic and the Democrats have been playing that up recently. And the left has never been able to do to abortion what they did to gay marriage.

Not going to lie - I'm pretty nervous about having this candidate up on the high Court. Anyone, and I mean anyone that's higher religious and believes conception starts at sex will be for overturning roe v Wade.

I know it's on humans to be less shitty with unprotected sex but does the world need more disabled people on welfare?

All Roe v. Wade did was hold that state laws criminalizing abortion violate the 14th Amendment. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it just kicks the abortion issue back to the states. And at this point in time there are probably only a handful of states where laws criminalizing abortion are likely to be passed. And this all assumes that a challenge to Roe v. Wade makes it to SCOTUS.
 
The Atlantic with a halfway decent article in 2020? Did reality split again while I wasn't looking?

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Will Democrats Fail the Amy Coney Barrett Test?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/judge-cant-be-handmaid/616494/ (https://archive.vn/LQBRL)

If the judge’s faith has put limits on her talent and ambition, there are few signs of it.
The first I heard of Amy Coney Barrett was when her name was floated as a possible nominee for the seat left vacant on the Supreme Court when Anthony Kennedy retired. I thought she was an interesting person, although not for any reasons of policy or politics: She is a mother of seven children, several of them very young; a Catholic; a deeply accomplished and distinguished member of the judiciary. I could not prevent myself from noticing, too, how beautiful she is, and wondering how the hell she balances raising seven children with her huge career. But there was little time to ponder these questions in my heart, as Mary did the annunciation, because Brett Kavanaugh was nominated instead of her, and things got so weird so fast that she slipped my mind.

Now, of course, Barrett is back in play, a possible nominee for the seat left vacant by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I hadn’t thought much about the matter until, in the act of blamelessly trying to get to the end of the internet, I came across a Newsweek story illustrated with a photograph of women wearing the now-familiar red capes with white-trimmed hoods—the universal symbol for female oppression of the most hideous kind. The headline read, “How Amy Coney Barrett’s People of Praise Group Inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”

That can’t possibly be true, I said to myself, and of course it’s not true. By the next morning, the newsmagazine had amended a correction:

Correction: This article’s headline originally stated that People of Praise inspired ‘The Handmaid's Tale’. The book’s author, Margaret Atwood, has never specifically mentioned the group as being the inspiration for her work. A New Yorker profile of the author from 2017 mentions a newspaper clipping as part of her research for the book of a different charismatic Catholic group, People of Hope. Newsweek regrets the error.
In journalism, there’s a name for this kind of correction. It’s called a bullshit correction. The only person who did her job correctly was the headline writer, who accurately condensed the thesis of the piece into a phrase. The mistakes were layered into the article itself, which Newsweek altered without calling the changes to the reader’s attention. There is a name for this, too, but I won’t repeat it here. The whole thing was a cupcake-size version of the Covington disaster, in which liberal journalists were so willfully blind to their own deep biases that they smeared an adolescent who was guilty only of smiling in an enigmatic and uncomfortable way.

Times are hard and talent is expensive, but the mistakes in this piece were so obvious that we may only ascribe them to rank incompetence. That such a calumny should have been based on one reporter’s misreading of a New Yorker profile in which the subject “mentions” a “newspaper clipping” about an entirely different religious group being “a part”—and not the whole—of her “research” means you’re in uncharted territory. I myself have traveled this unmapped region, because I used to teach seventh-grade English; that is, I am familiar with the challenge of supporting a strongly held claim with weakly grasped nonfacts.

It was a useless story in so many other ways. There wasn’t a single word on Barrett’s position on the Devil’s Triangle. And couldn’t the writer have placed a call to judicial expert Alyssa Milano? The incident fed into the “fake news” narrative and the suspicion that liberals disdain Christians—by being news that was fake and by betraying an obvious animus toward Christians.

Is Barrett’s religious faith pondered in her heart or made evident in her approach to the law? Answering that requires the labor-intensive task of actually learning something about her. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Barrett does belong to People of Praise, which is not my kind of thing—and it’s probably not your kind of thing either, as there are estimated to be only about 1,700 or so members. The group was founded in 1971, six years after Vatican II had reduced many of the strictures by which Catholics were meant to live their lives, unintentionally creating a void in the religious experience of many faithful. For some, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal filled that void, replacing the rigidity of pre–Vatican II Catholicism with the kind of ecstatic worship style of Pentecostals, including gifts of prophesy and of glossolalia. Although most People of Praise members apparently identify themselves as Catholics, the group has several practices that fall outside present-day Catholic doctrine, and—as far as I can tell—considers itself ecumenical.

What’s got everyone’s hair on fire is that, according to The New York Times, “the group teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family.” But the dastardly nature of this expectation is undermined by Barrett’s being shortlisted for a nomination to the Supreme Court. If her faith has put limits on her talent and ambition, there are few signs of it; you don’t get a seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (where she is currently is a judge) so that you can keep your hand in and earn a little pin money.

During the confirmation hearings for that appointment, Dianne Feinstein informed Barrett that “the dogma lives loudly within you,” which was a personal best for the senator because in just six words she managed to insult Barrett’s faith and accuse her of a thought crime. All Americans, no matter their job or position in society, are allowed to have their “dogma” live loudly within them, as the senator well knows. The only relevant question is whether Barrett’s faith has the possibility to interfere with her judicial decisions. It might.

Some will find evidence in a scholarly essay that Barrett co-authored in 1998 titled “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases.” The authors write that “litigants and the general public are entitled to impartial justice, which may be something a judge who is heedful of ecclesiastical pronouncements cannot dispense.” The authors discuss “the moral impossibility of enforcing capital punishment” and suggest that Catholic judges may need to recuse themselves from the sentencing phase of such cases. The essay does not discuss what Catholic judges should do in cases that conflict with other things forbidden by the Church—such as abortion, which is all but certain to face another Supreme Court challenge within the next decade. If Barrett is nominated, this essay will prompt intense questioning; at her previous confirmation hearing, she backed away from the suggestion of recusal. But the essay speaks loudly about her own belief that a particular faith—her own faith—could preclude a judge’s ability to follow the law.

I’m a Catholic, more or less. I can follow along with the Mass in many languages I don’t know, and at Mass I feel connected to generations of women in my family. But People of Praise is foreign to me. If I were in the Senate, I would want to know quite a bit about it, and in particular about what it requires of its members when they operate within the secular world. In other words, what are the ecclesiastical pronouncements of her faith? These are questions that could be asked in a thorough and respectful manner. Given the national mood, I doubt that will happen. Rather, if Barrett is nominated, the confirmation hearings are likely to provide Democratic senators with an opportunity to demonstrate their assumptions of moral rectitude and preening intellectual superiority. They will eagerly display the purifying anger that feeds their insulted and enraged party. In short, they will reify certain conservative assumptions about the left such that once again, Donald Trump may claim both the low road and the upper hand.
 
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