counterpunch.org
+ What I learned watching the Amy Coney Barrett hearings: Any Supreme Court precedent ACB won’t discuss is one she’s willing, if not eager, to overturn.
+ Barrett no longer has an opinion on all the opinions she’s written, both as an academic and a federal judge. Even Keats would be dazzled by that feat of negative capability.
+ Each GOP senator knows exactly what Barrett thinks and how she would rule on the legal, scientific, historical and etymological questions she stubbornly refuses to answer. Otherwise, they wouldn’t risk voting for her and having her turn out to be another Souter. That’s what the Federal Society’s pre-vetting process is all about. The people left in the dark are the very one’s she’s going to screw over as soon as she slips into her black robe.
+ Sen. Josh Hawley, who advertises himself as “constitutional scholar,” announced that merely mentioning the words “Griswold v. Connecticut” (the court’s birth control ruling) is evidence of anti-Catholic bias, which pretty much set the tenor for the Republicans’ defense for how Barrett cloaks extreme brand legal theories behind her even more extreme sect of Catholicism.
+ Barrett, and her fellow textualists, fetishize the sacred language of the Constitution the wording and meaning of which they can’t ever seem to recall…
+ Barrett: “I’m certainly not a scientist. I have read things about climate change. I would not say I have firm views on it.”
+ The Democrats, shock!, didn’t press her very hard on her denialist views or her ties to Shell Oil or the big climate case involving Shell that is heading toward the Court.
+ Even if Barrett “believed” in climate change, she’d still vote to eliminate any action the federal government takes to curb it.
+ The public figure Amy Coney Barrett reminds me most of is James Comey. They both ooze rectitude–nothing, not critics, friends or facts, will dissuade them from their certainty in their own righteousness.
+ Lindsey Graham to ACB: “You’re not aware of any effort to go back to the good old days of segregation by a legislative body, is that correct?” Say what?
+ Amy Coney Barrett: “I can’t speak to what the president has said on Twitter.” But she’s very eager to provide an exegesis of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffanys…
My freshman year, I took a literature class filled with upperclassmen English majors. When I did my first presentation—on Breakfast at Tiffany’s—I feared I had failed. But my professor filled me with confidence, became a mentor, and—when I graduated with a degree in English—gave me Truman Capote’s collected works.
+ Of course, she could have just watched the film, like George Costanza…
+ Q: Does federal law, under any circumstances, allow a president to delay an election? Barrett said she would have to consider, consult, research and that she is not a “legal pundit.”
+ As Dylan once sang, “As long as you didn’t say nothing, you could say anything…”
+ If Squee doesn’t show up with a kegger soon, this hearing will go down as the most boring in the history of the judiciary committee…
+ Apparently, I’m not the only one getting the shakes…Barrett: “I will approach every case with an open wine. Open mind.”
+ NYU sociologist Ann Morning: “Amy Coney Barrett on her white kids: ‘smart,’ ‘math gene,’ likely to go to law school. On her black kids: he is ‘happy-go-lucky’ and she ‘deadlifts as much as the male athletes.’ Judge Barrett’s 2020 description of her kids echoes 18th-century scientist Linnaeus: Homo europaeus is ‘acute, inventive’–i.e. smart–while Homo africanus is ‘relaxed’ and ‘indolent’–not smart.”
+ Torquemada commenting on today’s hearing: “Why have 9 justices? There’s only one way to interpret the law. It always worked for me.”
+ Religion was invoked about 80 times during the questioning of Amy Cone Barrett: 75 mentions came from Republicans or Barrett. Only five came from Democrats, who didn’t even attempt a mild interrogation of the religious views of a jurist whose embraces an extreme doctrine of Catholicism that is more reactionary than the much-feared Sharia Law. It sounded more like advertising than persecution.
+ Since Barrett is a self-described textualist and English Lit major it might be worth exploring the etymological evolution of her middle name, “coney,” which before the latest vowel shift was pronounced “kunnie,” to rhyme with money. A coney was a domestic rabbit raised “for the table,” but by Shakespeare’s time it was also slang for “vagina”, a poetic pun for “cunt”, an origin for cunnilingus, or coney-licking. |
