Amy Coney Barrett is neither ‘mystery’ nor ‘enigma’ ! The reader need only look to ‘Politico’, the American Political Gossip Sheet for a telling report on who Amy Coney Barrett is.
Headline: ‘She’s been groomed for this moment’: Amy Barrett’s Supreme Court preparation began early
Sub-headline: From her first year as a Notre Dame law student, conservatives marked her as a future leader in the mold of the Federalist Society.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been seated on the Supreme Court for only a year, in 1994, when a group of professors at the University of Notre Dame first recognized the potential of a first-year law student and began paving the way for her career as a conservative jurist: collaborating on scholarship, helping her land a Supreme Court clerkship and later recruiting her to the law school’s faculty.
The group was part of a growing legal movement opposed to the secularization of American society generally and to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in particular. The 1973 abortion-rights decision not only struck many conservatives as an affront their religious values, but to the principle of judicial restraint. To wage what would be a decades-long fight to reverse the activist decisions of the court from 1950s to the 1970s, they needed young legal minds like Barrett’s.
The plan worked better than they could have hoped. Now a judge on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett is the leading contender for President Donald Trump’s nomination to replace Ginsburg on the court. Her ascension would be a coup for Catholic culture warriors 25 years in the making and a high point in the right’s decades-long project of reshaping the judiciary.
“She was kind of the Manchurian candidate,” said one former colleague at Notre Dame Law School. “She’s been groomed for this moment all the way along.”…
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/20/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-419219
The Neo-Confederates, ‘Originalists’/’Textualists’ made a tactical mistake with Robert Bork, who looked like he stepped out of pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, not to speak of his part in Watergate:’
Robert H. Bork, a Yale Law School professor of public law, was appointed solicitor general by President Nixon in 1973 and became acting attorney general that October during the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre.” Nixon, worried by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox’s demands for the tapes of his Oval Office conversations, ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order, as did Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus. Nixon then turned to Bork, the number three official in the Justice Department, who carried out his wishes and fired Cox. Bork would defend his actions as within the scope of presidential authority. Nine months later, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over the tapes. Bork went on to become a conservative hero. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In 1987, Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court. After contentious hearings, Senate Democrats, still bothered by his role in the Saturday Night massacre and wary of his conservative philosophy, rejected his nomination. Bork resigned his judgeship in 1988 and joined the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, where he became a leading voice for neo-conservatism. In 2003, he left AEI for the Hudson Institute. He is currently a professor at the Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/bork.html |
Barrett’s self-presentation is about the creation of an ‘Image‘, that resonates with the viewer: a quiet, reasoned self-confidence, assumed by the viewer, and constantly repeated by her political allies, in the hearing room. Jurisprudential excellence is her metier, this is about a well practiced, adroit Public Relations campaign. Barrett is an accomplished political/civic actor, she has stage presence.
Amy Coney Barrett seems an adroit practitioner, of a highly truncated rhetoric of ‘Originalism’/’Textualism’ . She is poised , confident, charming and thought to be a judge of the first rank. Who will not let her religious beliefs intrude into her judicial decision making. Thomas B. Griffith assure his readers of this.
Headline: Amy Coney Barrett’s Religion Won’t Dictate Her Rulings
Sub-headline: A person of faith can be an impartial judge.
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Let me start with my own experience as a person of faith who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for 15 years. During those years, I gave dozens of talks at law schools, colleges and universities. The biographical introduction that typically preceded my remarks unavoidably announced my religious commitments. Before becoming a judge, I had been the general counsel of a prominent religious university, published on religious themes, and even taught courses in scriptural studies and theology.
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American Skeptic
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