We begin today’s roundup with Jamelle Bouie’s take on the Republican attempt to force the confirmation of SCOTUS nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett despite an election already underway:
This view — that if it’s allowed, it’s allowed — has been the dominant ethos of Republicans and their conservative allies going back at least as far as President Obama’s second term. It’s how they justified their blockade of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, filibustering Obama’s nominees and denouncing as “court packing” — a familiar refrain — his attempt to fill the vacancies. It’s also how they justified the subsequent obstruction of Merrick Garland’s path to the Supreme Court, arguing outright that the Senate’s constitutional power to “advise and consent” also included the right to deny a hearing altogether.
Of course, what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander. Once you reject the constraints imposed by norms in favor of an instrumentalism bound only by the text of the Constitution — an “originalist” politics, perhaps — you cannot then turn to those norms to protest an escalatory response or reprisal. Or rather you can, but no one has to take you seriously when you do.
And here is Michelle Goldberg’s take on the Republican’s bad faith arguments in response to Democratic calls for SCOTUS reform:
Now, facing another presidential election that they expect to lose, Republicans are caterwauling about Democratic calls to expand the court. As they prepare to jam through Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, Republicans are shocked — shocked! — that Democrats would contemplate playing constitutional hardball just as Republicans do. If Democrats jettison the Senate filibuster and add judges to the Supreme Court, Senator Ben Sasse said on “Fox News Sunday,” they’d be “suicide bombing” American institutions.
Say this for Republicans: They are very good at umbrage. It might even be sincere; from Reconstruction to the New Deal to the civil rights revolution, conservatives have long felt genuinely victimized by the prospect of equality. That doesn’t mean, however, that bad-faith right-wing arguments about the courts merit a respectful hearing.
Emma Green at
The Atlantic highlights “the irony at the heart of the Amy Coney Barrett fight”:
Republicans have a strong interest in selling their Supreme Court nominee and their party as true advocates for women. President Donald Trump consistently trails Joe Biden among female voters, falling anywhere from nine to 31 percentage points behind the former vice president in national polls. “If you’re talking about the group that has changed the most in terms of who they supported, and have shifted from R to D, that’s college-educated white women,” Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University at Camden, recently told me. In other words, Republicans are hurting most among women who look like Barrett: people who are professionally ambitious and are likely balancing careers and motherhood. Many American women who fit this description may not think there’s a home for them on the right. Now in the national spotlight, less than three weeks before the election, Barrett offers Republicans a conservative model of feminism to point to, one in which women can lead exceptional careers, cultivate large families, remain dedicated to their communities and their faith—and be conservative.
And in case you missed it, here is Senator Elizabeth Warren’s analysis of the dangers of seating Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court:
As I recently said on the Senate floor, if Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans ram this nomination through, it is our duty to explore every option we have to restore the court’s credibility and integrity. Every option to expand our democracy, not shrink it. Every option to ensure that a working single parent and a millionaire corporate executive have equal justice in our courts. And every option to ensure that all Americans are represented in our institutions.
If this feels personal, that’s because it is. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a personal hero for me and for millions of other women. She was a woman who never let any man silence her. The most fitting tribute to her is to refuse to be silenced and to stop Donald Trump and Senate Republicans from stealing her Supreme Court seat.