On Saturday,President Trumpintroduced his nominee for the United States Supreme Court: Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
No one can argue that Judge Barrett lacks the traditional qualifications of a nominee for the high court:summa cum laude honors from Notre Dame Law School,a clerkship for Justice Scalia, decades in private practice and academia and experience as afederal appellate court judge. But behind her credentials and Midwestern politeness, there are some dark, unspoken truths.
I do not want to talk about Amy Coney Barrett as a person. Enveloping her career and propelling her nomination to the Supreme Court is a decades-long,conservative movement to capture the American judicial system.
From the1950s through the 1970s,the Supreme Court was a relatively left-wing body thatoutlawed segregation,legalized abortion anddefended The New York Times when it printed classified information about the war in Vietnam.
But in 1982, a group of conservative legal thinkers and rabid, young Ivy League lawyers realized that the American conservative project could quietly expand its influence through the judiciary.Its first meeting was held at Yale University in the spring of 1982.After decades of liberal dominance on the Supreme Court,conservatives learned that no matter how dominant they remained electorally, a liberal judiciary would kill all conservative goals (namely, the overturning of Roe v. Wade).
From that initial conference, the Federalist Society was born, and it would eventually become a massive breeding ground for far-right legal thinkers and activists. Every Republican appointee currently sitting on the court has been said to be affiliated with the Federalist Society.
The Federalist Societyis in no way the only organization dedicated to capturing the American judiciary, but no other group better exemplifies the network of billionaires, ideologues and politicians who want to move the court far to the right.
This nomination cannot be about any one person’s individual qualities, beliefs or experiences. If Democrats even begin to argue about Barrett’s record, ideology or faith, they will immediately cede the most important argument: that the system itself is corrupted.
In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellstole a Supreme Court seat from a Democratic president and handed it to a Republican one simply because he could.Senate Republicansrushed Brett Kavanaugh through the process without any real investigation into his past. But despite how blatantly wrong those confirmations were, they will pale in comparison to Barrett.
In replacing Ginsburg with a Scalia redux, Trump will forever alter the court and every aspect of the United States. Barrett is 48 years old. She will most likely sit on the court until I am a grandfather. It is impossible to understate how wildly corrupted this process is, and just how impactful she could be. For the next four decades, Barrett will have the power to review and issue opinions on every single aspect of American life.
