Amy Coney Barrett spent day two of her Supreme Court confirmation hearings showing how many ways a person can dodge and obfuscate. Barrett answered basically nothing, pretending that she, despite being a person who has in the past expressed many strong views on the law, suddenly has no opinions about anything. She wouldn’t even commit to an answer on whether a president can unilaterally delay an election or whether a president should pledge a peaceful transfer of power. This is outrageous and dangerous.
On day three of the hearings, Barrett will face another round of questions, with senators getting 20 minutes each. Will Democrats continue trying to get her to say something, anything, relevant about how she would approach key issues? Will they try to get her to give ever-more-outrageous demurrals that show just how badly she’s lying in these hearings? Will they follow Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s searing example by laying bare what a farce this hearing is and the toxic process that brought us to this point? One obvious point for Democrats to press on is the simple fact that this nomination has been put above COVID-19 economic relief.
Another question is how Barrett will inadvertently give herself away even in the midst of non-answers. On Tuesday, that came when she claimed, “I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would never discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.” Only instead of conveying that she would never discriminate, she conveyed that she’s a person who thinks in anti-LGBTQ terminology: “sexual preference.” As Kerry Eleveld wrote, “the notion that anyone chooses to be gay or date people of the same sex is not only antiquated, it's the also the baseline that anti-LGBTQ activists have used for decades to advance and defend laws expressly discriminating against gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans. It's the verbiage of someone who lives in a highly conservative social bubble and traffics in anti-gay legal doctrine.”
Will Barrett give herself away again? It’s going to be another long day of lies and evasion, either way.