With the swearing-in of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett last night, we once again have a full Supreme Court. At 48 years old, Justice Barrett is younger than my oldest brother, and she will be partly responsible for answering every constitutional question that arises for what I assume will be the rest of my lifetime.
She joins two other justices appointed by President Trump. The first, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, is two years older than my oldest brother, and the second, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is four years older than my oldest brother.
Here’s what I know about them. Justice Gorsuch is either an idiotic judge or a convoluted corporate bootlicker because those are the only ways a person could talk themselves into finding against the frozen trucker. His written opinions since his inauguration have done nothing to change my own, including his opinion on Bostock v. Clayton County, which recognized for the first time the legal right of homosexuals and transgender persons to be free from discrimination in the workplace thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
While I adore the result of Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, I loathe the language and logic he used to defend it. It is pretentious and pedantic, the result of the worst tendencies of low-grade philosophers. The only emotion present in the writing is whatever we want to call the motivating force behind every man’s “Well, actually…”
Justice Kavanaugh, meanwhile, quotes the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s non-court writings as if they were the law itself. His use of the quotations is not an issue — hundreds of the Court’s opinions and dissents quote from literary and scholarly (i.e., nonlegal) texts, after all. The issue is that Justice Kavanaugh believes so strongly in the textualism that Justice Scalia was selling that he forgot to wipe the man’s shit from his lips.
While I enjoyed Justice Scalia’s writings, I disagreed vehemently with where he allowed his thoughts to take him. Justice Scalia’s textualist approach to the law is necessarily conservative, and by virtue of our legal and political history, necessarily oppressive to minorities. It reinforces the status quo, which again, by virtue of our legal and political history, is necessarily oppressive to minorities. Finally, it ignores the dramatic changes that can occur in a culture above and beyond the legal and political realm, a realm that has always been defended and protected by the wealthy and their citizen soldiers, and thus necessarily oppressive to minorities.
And now, to the frozen-trucker fucker and Scalia’s human centipede, President Trump and the Republicans in the Senate have added Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Here’s what I know about her. She’s super Catholic, super anti-abortion, and she disagrees with the current legal standing of the Affordable Care Act.
I tried watching some of her confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee so I could learn more about her, but I only had time to watch it on the first day, when all of the senators on the committee spent their allotted minutes speechifying about their opponents rather than interrogating the nominee in front of them. I couldn’t watch anything she said on the second or third day of her testimony because, despite speaking into the microphone for all to hear, she didn’t actually say much, choosing instead to obfuscate her thinking and deny the public a fair and transparent airing of her thoughts, opinions, and legal style.
After commiserating over her confirmation, I said to my wife that we have no choice but to give Justice Barrett the benefit of the doubt, but I fear any doubt she won’t be a terrible force on the bench comes more from my ignorance of her legal writings than from any legal opinion she has delivered — which is to say, due to the makeup of her supporters, I find it hard to doubt she won’t be a terrible justice, but I guess I ought to start there?
The problem, of course, is that she allowed herself to participate in this anti-democratic process in the first place. Any individual with integrity would have stood up for the American people and declared that while she would be honored to serve as the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, she couldn’t in good conscience do so until the American people affirm their faith in the President’s leadership (what with her swearing-in ceremony coming just eight days before election day and several weeks after tens of millions of Americans have mailed in their ballots).
Justice Barrett’s decision to participate in this political farce demonstrates her inability to defend our American experiment from corruption by this nation’s powerful and corrupting oligarchy. Her decision to accept the timing of this nomination, more so than any decision she may have filed from the bench, removes whatever doubt I wish I could hold about the positive potential of her tenure.
However, like all good Americans, I truly, desperately, and heart-achingly hope I am wrong.
