Guns, Fetuses, and For-Profit Health Insurance

 What could be more important during this dangerous pandemic and its ensuing mass human misery and despair than the topics in the title of this post?

 

Thus far in the Senate's Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett, this trifecta of partisan wedge issues has reigned supreme. With the showboating and grilling not even reaching the midpoint as of this writing, I suppose we can still hold out hope that one lone legislator comes out and asks Barrett for her initial visceral reaction to meeting Donald Trump in the flesh for the first time. Given that she has coyly refused to commit to recusing herself on his likely legal challenge to Joe Bidens predicted landslide victory, I doubt she'll be giving even the slightest hint of any human reaction. Not even in the unlikely event that a senile Judiciary Committee member veers off script and blurts it right out. As of Tuesday, Dianne Feinstein, 87, was living back in the 1950s, haunted by anecdotal memories of her peers' back-alley abortions. She is afraid that era will come back in the event of a Barrett confirmation, because Roe v Wade is not yet, according to Barrett, a "super precedent" exempt from overturning. Of course, the nominee will not say whether or not she'd vote to overturn it because she reassuringly won't be "queen of the world" with the power to overturn anything until and unless a challenge "winds its way" up to the highest court.

With corporate lawyers and oligarchs controlling all three branches of the US government, I just cannot not get the image of side-winding slithery snakes in suits out of my head.

 I was actually waiting for one of the inquisitors to press Barrett on the unseemliness of holding the first day of this rushed hearing on Columbus Day, a national holiday whose symbolism is integral to the culture wars which artificially separate the Republicans from the Democrats. To hear Trump's GOP tell it, any defacing or tear-downs of statues of the invaders, slave-owners and ethnic cleansers of yore is not to be tolerated. So why were they conducting government business on such a sacred day when all good patriots should be marching to honor Columbus and battling all those Woke Antifa hordes in our midst? Since Columbus was bankrolled by good Catholics and Inquisitors Ferdinand and Isabella,  somebody at least could have asked her if the Columbus Day session had offended her religious sensibilities.

Instead, the Republicans on the panel can't shut up about the Democrats attacking her Catholicism (which they aren't) and the Democrats telling one maudlin story after the other about the lucky people whose lives and bank accounts were saved by the Affordable Care Act. These heartbreaking stories are designed to instill guilt into a woman who has already experienced a whole lifetime of absorbing Catholic guilt, and who uses the so-called Ginsburg rule of never disclosing to the public what she thinks about any issue with which she might be confronted as a Supreme. This convenient unwritten rule gives her and other judicial nominees an easy out that mere mortals can never get away with in a job interview. If past writings and deeds are revealed, the nominees can easily dismiss them as the writings and deeds of a private citizen. We are supposed to believe that once judges don their magical black robes, they magically strip themselves of prejudices, not to mention their very fallible humanity.

Is anybody buying this nonsense?

Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois broke ranks for a bit when he challenged Barrett on a recent dissenting opinion in which she argued that a convicted felon's right to own a gun is a Second Amendment right, whereas the stripping of the voting rights of convicted felons is a matter for individual states to decide. Just as she was holding forth like a twisted pretzel on the rights of states to bar ex-cons from voting, but claiming that a mere fraudster should be entitled to bear arms, C-Span broke away from this important and interesting exchange to cover the pro-forma convening of the (empty) lower House.

The House was not actually meeting to discuss anything so mundane as Covid relief, or how to combat Donald Trump's ominous plans to "monitor" polling places on Election Day. But C-Span had to do its own patriotic duty of filming the solemn pounding of the gavel. And then everybody went to lunch. And then I took the opportunity to write this quick blog post before getting back to the depressing Senate spectacle.

Eric Levitz has an interesting piece at New York magazine which discusses the "Constitutional originalism" embraced by Barrett and her hard-right mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. This legal principle is nothing but a smokescreen for conservative hypocrisy. It's impossible, Levitz writes, to fall back on a "strict" reading of the Constitution because its wording was always made deliberately vague.

When justices claim the authority to determine the unequivocal meaning of a phrase at a given point in history, they are not demonstrating judicial humility but supreme arrogance. The farcical nature of the originalist enterprise was made plain in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller. Then, Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens each produced their own historical monograph on the Second Amendment’s contemporary meaning, which arrived at antithetical conclusions that just so happened to line up perfectly with each jurist’s ideological tendency. The opinions nevertheless had one thing in common: Both were poorly regarded by actual historians.

Barrett did give one clue during Tuesday morning's session on how she squares her professional legal life with her religious life. After arriving at a decision that might be hurtful to a human being, she testified, she then asks herself how she would feel if, for example, it was her own child bearing the brunt of it. If she concludes that her decision was still a fair one no matter how injurious to this hypothetical child of hers, then her conscience is entirely clear. She has proven to her own satisfaction that she was in the right. She not only examines her conscience, she cross-examines her conscience. And she never has to look back. Second-guessing herself is apparently not part of her repertoire.

This courage of her own convictions is so absolutely and rigidly righteous, it should scare people.

And both the Democrats and the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were glowing in their effusive praise of how well-behaved and how quiet  six of her children were, sitting behind her in the audience. (The seventh, a boy with Down Syndrome, was left at home, but was very excited to see Mom on television, she said.)

Somebody should ask her how she feels about Trump's penchant for making fun of disabled people.

There are plenty more smart,  qualified and well-credentialed people just like Amy Coney Barrett waiting in the right wings, ready and willing and able to challenge Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or another conservative neoliberal Democrat in 2024.

If you think, correctly, that Trump is a menace, then just try to imagine a Trump with a high IQ who knows when to keep his or her mouth shut while sowing conscience-free chaos.