We’ve been told that Democrats didn’t want to use attacks on Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholic faith when she was nominated to fill the vacancy left by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. For the most part, they didn’t, but only because it was expected. It was truly the only thing that Democrats had in their attack plan, but with an election—they couldn’t infuriate the Catholic voter base. In general, this late in the game, regarding any move that could be viewed as pissing off voters—best to just not poke that bear. So, Democrats didn’t attack her on faith but decided to zero in on Obamacare, gun rights, and abortion. With each attempted swipe, Barrett slapped it down. She’s too smart for Democrats. She’s immensely qualified to be on the Supreme Court. Period. This game was over before it began, and it solidified the conservative tilt of the Court for the next generation or so.
Still, we all know Democrats hate her for being Catholic. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) made ACB famous when she was questioned about her Catholic faith when she was a nominee for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals three years ago. So, it should shock us that a Biden lackey urged Democrats to channel their inner-Catholic bigotry to derail ACB’s nomination (via Fox News):
A member of President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition team argued earlier this year that Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s faith should be probed by Democrats as a potential means to prove that she was unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.
Barbara McQuade, who was tapped for Biden’s legal review team earlier this month, penned an opinion article for MSNBC in October where she argued that Democrats should attempt to expose Barrett’s personal faith as inconsistent with the job’s requirement to uphold the rule of law.
The argument is based on a paper Barrett wrote more than two decades ago with one of her law school professors, where it is argued that Catholic judges are “morally precluded” from enforcing the death penalty and should therefore recuse themselves from related cases.
[…]
To expose the risk of Barrett's refusal to follow precedent, Senate Democrats should focus not on when life begins, but on when it ends,” McQuade wrote in her piece. “Just as [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg exposed discrimination by focusing on the rights of men, Senate Democrats can expose Barrett's lack of fidelity to the rule of law by exposing her views on the death penalty.”
Barrett, however, has since cleared up how she would reconcile her personal faith with her legal rulings.
When questioned about the topic during her 2017 confirmation hearing, Barrett noted that every idea expressed in the article is not necessarily reflective of how she thinks about the same issues more than 20 years later, as pointed out by The National Review.
Recommended
Biden adviser Barbara McQuade wanted to sink Amy Coney Barrett over Catholic faith https://t.co/ZZRTB0KYQf
— JCN (@judicialnetwork) November 20, 2020
They also said she had no judicial experience or something, but neither did Justice Elena Kagan. Next.
As for Biden’s picks for a transition team, yeah—we shouldn’t be shocked that we have such characters in this crew, including hordes of anti-free speech clowns. Katie wrote about this, and quoted liberal law professor Jonathan Turley who has a lot of anxiety over this team:
"For those of us who have been critical of the growing anti-free speech movement in the Democratic Party, the Biden transition team just took an ominous turn. The New York Post reports that Biden tapped Richard Stengel to take the “team lead” position on the US Agency for Global Media, including Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty," Turley writes on his website. "As I previously addressed in a column, Stengel has been one of the most controversial figures calling for censorship and speech controls. For a president-elect who just called for everyone to “hear each other,” he picked a top aide who wants to silence many. Since it would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president. This is not the first Biden aide to indicate a crackdown on free speech in the new Administration and Biden himself has called for greater censorship on the Internet."
Join the conversation as a VIP Member