Amy Coney Barrett is a political hack
The nominee proves that the Supreme Court is not apolitical
In 2016, then Notre Dame Law School professor Amy Coney Barrett argued on CBS News that Merrick Garland should not be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Garland, of course, was appointed by President Barack Obama to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 after Scalia’s death. That appointment was made on March 16 of that year, 237 days before that year’s election.
Barrett argued that the appointment should not go forward for two reasons. First, it was an election year. Second, Garland, at the time a 63 year-old, highly qualified centrist judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, would “dramatically flip the balance of power on the court.”
The ideological distance between Scalia and Garland pales in comparison to the difference between Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barrett. Where Garland was a moderate who had been praised by many Republicans, Barrett is an ideological conservative, as different from the liberal lion Ginsburg as is possible. Garland was also relatively old for a Supreme Court nominee at 63. Barrett will likely serve on the Court for a long time, unless the system is reformed, given her relatively youthful 48 years. Finally, this nomination comes just 38 days before the election.
Rushing to confirm her nomination has put a number of Republican Senators in an uncomfortable position. Chief among them is Lindsey Graham, currently locked in a tight race for re-election, who argued in 2016 “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’ And you could use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right.”
And in 2018, Graham told The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election.”
