It’s not exactly a surprise. Ultra-conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett was at the top of almost every list of Donald Trump’s expected nominees for the Supreme Court—including mine. There is absolutely no doubt that Barrett represents a threat to quickly rip apart the work that Justice Ginsburg did over the years protecting and extending the rights of every America. Which is, of course, exactly why the far right is so excited to see her name put forward. Barrett is a religious extremist, a member of a small sect that takes the inherent misogyny of traditional Catholicism and adds to it the by doubling down with … more misogyny. She’s a originalist extremist, holding onto a view of Constitutional interpretation so strict, she’s ready to toss out the 14th Amendment. And, of course, she’s a hypocrite, conveniently ignoring her own 2016 statement that seating a new justice should wait until after the election. But then … “hypocrite” is just an alternative title for “Republican.”
NPR has a good background piece on Barrett, which also points out that if Republicans succeed in seating her before the election, she will immediately face a case on the Affordable Care Act. Twice before, Obamacare has survived razor-thin votes in the court. Having Barrett in position could mean that millions of Americans lose their healthcare in the middle of a pandemic. It also means that over 7 million Americans would find themselves unprotected from costs of having a pre-existing condition simply for having a positive COVID-19 test on their record. The odds of Barrett joining with the four most conservative justices to strike down Obamacare seem extremely high since she has already written a legal article saying that Chief Justice John Roberts overreached when saving the plan, and that it should have lost.
For those that love guns, Barrett is likely to use upcoming cases to continue bloating the Second Amendment. Despite saying that her idea of law requires that a jurist hold to the public meaning of the law at the time it was written, she somehow doesn’t seem to believe the Second Amendment means that people should be restricted to carrying muskets. Instead, she is likely to be the fifth vote toward removing most all limits on weapons.
At 48, Barrett will be the youngest justice if her nomination survives the Senate. This would position her to reshape the court for decades.
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