I have little to add to what I already wrote about my decades-long ties to The University of Notre Dame du Lac. I will merely note that RFK was still alive the first time that I set foot on its campus at age 9. I will further note that, as is my fall Saturday habit, I set aside the hours in which the Irish faced Pitt today—although I didn’t watch that much of the 2d half of a dominating win.
In addition to the dread that I feel about the looming confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett (ACB) to a SCOTUS seat that she will likely still hold when I leave this mortal coil, I feel a deep and profound sense of sorrow. The fact that a university to which I have been so attached for so long so visibly threw its institutional might behind her nomination compounds the misery. Along with the law dean, university president Fr. John Jenkins attended the Rose Garden political rally/product roll-out (and placed social convention over public health by not wearing a mask at that superspreader event). He issued the following enthusiastic endorsement:
"The same impressive intellect, character and temperament that made Judge Barrett a successful nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals will serve her and the nation equally well as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court," Jenkins said in a statement. "She is a person of the utmost integrity who, as a jurist, acts first and foremost in accordance with the law."
As to ACB’s, character, I know from bitter personal experience from my tangential involvement in the 2000 Florida recount that her assertion, under oath, that she could not recall what her involvement was in that legal travesty strains credulity:
KLOBUCHAR: I want to turn to something we talked about yesterday... You worked on the recount in Florida that was related to the Bush v. Gore case, including on an absentee ballot issue on behalf of the Republican side of that case, is that right?
BARRETT: I did work on Bush v. Gore on behalf of the Republican side. To be fully honest, I can't remember exactly what piece of the case it was.
I still recall, IN DETAIL, what I did then, and I did it on a pro bono basis in discussions with a close friend. I didn’t do it as part of my job. As my diary linked above notes, the case I provided advice on involved, ironically enough, the same point of law addressed in the case she she litigated. The case that I helped my friend on, in fact, is mentioned in the linked article.
Being involved, even peripherally, in a case in which the awesome power of the presidency was at stake is something that no attorney will ever forget. She was involved more than peripherally then. One sure as hell doesn’t forget one’s involvement 20 years later, especially when one hasn’t been involved in anything half as portentous in the interim.
As to ACB’s intellect, she called climate change a matter of opinion in an exchange with Sen. Harris:
The federal appeals court judge responded that she did think coronavirus was infectious and smoking caused cancer. She rebuffed Harris on the climate change question, however, for seeking to “solicit an opinion” on a “matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial”.
Given the vast body of scientific evidence, Judge Barrett’s claim that the existence of climate change is “an opinion” is roughly equivalent to claiming that the existence of gravity is “an opinion.” Anyone with the intellectual capacity to obtain a JD in the bottom half of the class of a low-end for profit law school should be expected to know the scientific evidence demonstrating the fact of climate change. A first in her class law student and a subsequent tenured professor at Notre Dame should know it the same way that she knows that Marbury v. Madison established the principle of judicial review.
Finally, her resume is the thinnest of any SCOTUS nominee since 1991:
Page counts, of course, are not a perfect proxy for experience, but the relative paucity of Barrett’s is an indication of just how circumscribed her legal experience has been compared with virtually all of her predecessors—and even one nominee who was ultimately denied the position. The permanent record of the 48-year-old former Notre Dame law school professor is in direct proportion with her resume, which is strikingly thin for someone nominated to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court. By almost any objective measure, Barrett is the most inexperienced person nominated to the Supreme Court since 1991, when President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, then just 43, to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall.
It was surprising to read a comparison of her credentials of those of Harriett Miers, whose nomination George W. Bush was forced to withdraw in 2005:
Even Harriet Miers had a more substantial legal background than Barrett. Miers was the last woman a Republican president tried (though failed) to put on the high court. Then more than a decade older than Barrett is now, she was White House counsel for President George W. Bush when he nominated her in 2005 to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court. Conservatives ultimately torpedoed her nomination because they thought she’d go all wobbly on abortion or other conservative litmus-tests issues, much the way they believed George H.W. Bush’s nominee Justice David Souter did. Miers had once been a Democrat and conservatives attacked her credentials, suggesting that while she’d litigated and argued a host of cases in federal and state courts, they weren’t the right kind of cases. (Flash forward to Barrett, who has never litigated anything in federal court.)
The fight over her failed nomination obscured Miers’ rather impressive resume. Though never a judge, she had been a trailblazer in Texas, where she was the first woman hired at the big firm now known as Locke Lorde—and eventually its first female president. She was the first woman to head the State Bar of Texas. At one point, she even served as a witness in a sexual discrimination case against her own firm—the sort of experience Ginsburg might have appreciated in a colleague.
The prestige of having one of its own on the high court is an alluring proposition for a university that sometimes seems to be uncertain about its self-identity. For reasons that I have never understood, a university that had painstakingly carved out its own unique identity over many decades in its obscure location in northern Indiana sometimes seems to aspire to the status of a Stanford or of an Ivy League institution. Pushing to have one of its own in such a high-profile position, regardless of the merits of her nomination, is consistent with such status seeking.
As per Mark 8:36:
What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
Notre Dame apparently will soon gain a Court seat at the price of forfeiting a piece of its soul. It is a Faustian bargain.