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“The Senate on Monday night confirmed Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the 115th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.” SCOTUSblog
See our prior coverage of the Supreme Court nomination here, here, and here. The Flip Side
The right applauds Barrett’s confirmation.
“Republicans have not shattered any norms… the norm is that when the same party controls the presidency and the Senate, the president’s nominees are confirmed, even in an election year. The Republicans did not break rules. To the extent there was a rule, it was the filibuster . . . but Democrats trashed it in connection with lower-court judicial nominations… In the 1992 election year, Democrats led by then-Senator Joe Biden vowed not to confirm a Republican nominee; in the 2016 election year, Democrats egged on by then-Vice President Joe Biden urged the confirmation of an Obama nominee. The only ‘rule’ is having the power to actuate what a party’s political will demands…
“Republicans did not break their word. Yes, Republicans’ 2016 campaign rhetoric urged that the voters should decide which candidate — Trump or Clinton — should fill the vacancy created by Justice Scalia’s death. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took pains to point out that there was a stalemate because the presidency and the Senate were controlled by different parties. He did not say the Senate would defy history by declining to approve a nominee if both sides of the equation were controlled by the same party…
“[Furthermore] Conservative justices believe in restraint. In their view, it is not the Court’s job to make policy. As long as they adhere to the Constitution in enacting their agenda, lawmakers — very much including left-wing Democrats — get a wide berth from conservative justices to enact their policy goals. The caveat is that Democrats must enact their own policies — the politically accountable officials must adopt them by law, not rely on judges to impose them by fiats rationalized by distorting what the Constitution actually says.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
“[Barrett’s] poise and fluency explain why 51% of Americans, in a Gallup poll last week, said they want to see her ascend to the Supreme Court… Majority Leader Mitch McConnell deserves special credit for helping to reshape the federal courts after decades of liberal dominance. In addition to three associate Justices, the Senate in the last three-and-a-half years has confirmed 53 circuit judges, or about 30% of the appellate total, plus 162 district judges…
“President Trump has honored his 2016 campaign promise by appointing distinguished jurists who adhere to a broad church of originalist views. As even a critic at the left-wing Vox web site has admitted: ‘Based solely on objective legal credentials, the average Trump appointee has a far more impressive résumé than any past president’s nominees.’”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“In 1987, Senator Ted Kennedy defeated a nomination by painting a frightening picture of ‘Robert Bork’s America.’ In 2018, Democrats nearly succeeded in defeating Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination after accusing him of everything from perjury to sexual assault. In 2020, in the heat of the first presidential debate, Joe Biden said of Barrett: ‘I’m not opposed to the justice; she seems like a very fine person.’…
“Barrett performed well at the hearings… she came across exactly as one would have expected after reading the American Bar Association’s evaluation of her nomination to the Supreme Court. It reported, ‘Most remarkably, in interviews with individuals in the legal profession and community who know Judge Barrett, whether for a few years or decades, not one person uttered a negative word about her character.’ By the end of the hearings, Barrett’s opponents were reduced to complaining about the good impression she makes… That blank page of notes she held up might as well have been a list of all the Democratic criticisms of her that connected with the public.”
Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg
“The obvious issue surrounding Barrett’s nomination, and that of every Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork in 1987, is abortion… Voters who care about abortion can now change policy only by influencing the judges on the federal courts. Overturning Roe v. Wade would not only reverse a poorly reasoned decision, but it could set the nation on a better course. Reversing Roe v. Wade would not end abortion in the nation, but only return the question to Congress and the nation’s statehouses. States could choose different abortion regimes, just as they do with crime and other life and death questions, and people can move to live in states whose policies they like.”
John Yoo, Fox News
“Look at that scene at the White House tonight. A black Supreme Court justice swears in a female Supreme Court justice. Both of them are religious believers. Both of them are conservative… When Justice Thomas was born, in 1948, there had never been a black man on the Supreme Court. When Justice Barrett was born, in 1972, the first female justice was still nine years away. And now look at the two of them at the White House tonight. They stand for what is best in America.”
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative
The left calls for reforms to rebalance the Supreme Court’s ideological tilt.
The left calls for reforms to rebalance the Supreme Court’s ideological tilt.
“When [Barrett] takes her seat on the bench at One First Street, it will represent the culmination of a four-decade crusade by conservatives to fill the federal courts with reliably Republican judges who will serve for decades as a barricade against an ever more progressive nation…
“It was never about the supposed mistreatment that Robert Bork… Senate Democrats gave Judge Bork a full hearing [in 1987], during which millions of Americans got to experience firsthand his extremist views on the Constitution and federal law. He received an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, where his nomination was defeated by Democrats and Republicans together. President Ronald Reagan came back with a more mainstream choice, Anthony Kennedy, and Democrats voted to confirm him nine months before the election…
“Compare that with Republicans’ 2016 blockade of Judge Merrick Garland, whom they refused even to consider, much less to vote on… In 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protected same-sex marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia angrily dissented. ‘A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy,’ he wrote. The American people, who have preferred the Democratic nominee in six of the last seven presidential elections, are now subordinate to a solid 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”
Editorial Board, New York Times
“In 2016, President Trump lost the national popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He lost it by a lot — 2,865,075 votes, to be precise. Meanwhile, the Senate just voted to confirm Trump’s third nominee to the Supreme Court… While pro-Barrett senators control a majority of the Senate, they represent nowhere near a majority of the entire nation. Indeed, the senators who voted against Barrett represent 13,524,906 more people than the senators who voted for her…
“These two numbers — 2,865,075 and 13,524,906 — should inform how we view the actions Barrett will take now that she is one of the nine most powerful judges in the country… [American democracy] has slipped into a death spiral. Anti-democratic features of our Constitution enabled a party that does not enjoy majority support to gain power. That party is now entrenching its power by appointing judges who tend to be hostile to voting rights. And, as the courts hand down more and more decisions undermining the right to vote, Democrats will find it harder and harder to compete in national elections.”
Ian Millhiser, Vox
“The only question left for Democrats, should they win the election that McConnell has evidently already given up on, is whether they’re willing to prove McConnell wrong. McConnell’s strategy makes sense only if Democrats are too weak and fractured to do what is necessary to take back the Supreme Court should they win the current election. He is clearly betting they are. He is betting that the Democrats will spend all their time in power making cosmetic changes through popular legislation, without challenging the structure McConnell has fundamentally altered…
“Democrats could counter the corruption and damage done during McConnell’s reign by expanding the court and instituting reforms to make confirmation battles less political. By adding 10 or 20 justices, a smart court-expansion plan would make each individual justice less important and depoliticize the fight over their successors when they die. Democrats could then pass ethics reforms—reforms that would be judged constitutional by the new, expanded court—which could mandate the recusal of, say, a judge appointed in an election year from cases involving that election.”
Elie Mystal, The Nation
“There might be another way to block a hard, sudden swing to the right on the Supreme Court. Legal theorists largely agree that the Constitution actually allows Congress to restrict the Supreme Court’s authority to hear cases on a specific subject matter, such as abortion. Lawmakers have tried to use this power by passing legislation declaring certain topics off-limits for the court, but they have failed to rally the necessary majorities to pass those bills. Now, with what some see as a nakedly political play by Republicans to shape the ideology of the court, the American public and lawmakers might be more open to such a strategy…
“Packing the court would involve confirming new justices that upon confirmation would be subject to life tenure and protection against removal, subject only to impeachment for cause. This makes the court-packing decision rather difficult to reverse. Jurisdiction-stripping [on] the other hand is achieved through normal legislative procedures, and can therefore be easily reversed should the voters decide to change the political makeup of Congress and the White House again. In this way, jurisdiction-stripping measures are far more responsive to the will of the electorate.”
Kia Rahnama, Politico
