Amy Barrett — Immediately, If Not Sooner American Spectator, Sep 19, 2020, Scott McKay
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Why Amy Barrett? Start with the political.
This appointee needs to be a woman. Yes, as conservatives we hate the idea of quotas and checklists, but it’s an election year. And since Trump didn’t go with a woman to replace Anthony Kennedy or Antonin Scalia, he has to go with one to replace Ginsburg. Besides, the fact that Republican women haven’t been represented on the Supreme Court since Sandra Day O’Connor rankles a bit; you’ve got to offer big parts of your base role models when you can.
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For example, and this is important, she isn’t another Ivy League elitist judge. While the Supreme Court is loaded down with law school graduates from Harvard and Yale, Barrett is a Notre Dame graduate. That’s a big deal. The most important imbalance on the Court isn’t that it has too many men, or too many white people, or too many conservatives — it’s that it has too many people who come from a very insular, elitist perspective that does not reflect the experience of ordinary Americans.
Amy Barrett is neither East Coast nor West Coast. She grew up outside of New Orleans, attended elementary and middle school at St. Catherine of Siena Catholic School in the middle-class suburb of Metairie, St. Mary’s Dominican High School in the city, graduating in 1990, and then Rhodes College in Memphis. Barrett obtained her law degree from Notre Dame, then after a pair of clerkships for distinguished jurists Lawrence Silberman and Antonin Scalia and a couple of stints at well-respected private law firms, became a law professor at Notre Dame for several years before her nomination to the 7th Circuit in 2017.
Barrett’s confirmation to the 7th Circuit was a disaster for the Left. It included the famous gaffe by California’s Dianne Feinstein in which the latter essentially attempted to disqualify Barrett for having deeply held Catholic beliefs, as though that made her akin to a cult member. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that people have fought for for years in this country,†Feinstein told Barrett during the confirmation hearings, in a moment most Democrats would like to forget.
It was an excellent performance, one which put Barrett on the map as a potential Supreme Court justice, and Barrett’s demeanor and poise in handling Feinstein’s rather obnoxious assault was eye-opening in a positive way. When Sen. Dick Durbin embarrassed himself asking Barrett whether she was an “orthodox Catholic,†and when the idiot Al Franken attempted to make her out as a homophobe because she had delivered a lecture on constitutional law at a seminar put on by the Alliance Defending Freedom, on the basis of a laughable designation of ADF as a “hate group†by the far-left terrorist inspirers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, it became quite clear that Amy Barrett is not someone the Democrats can beat down in a confirmation hearing.
Read more:
https://spectator.org/amy-barrett-immediately-if-not-sooner/
