Who Is Replacing Justice Ruth Ginsburg?
DAILY KOS’s Joan Mc Carter gives an excellent rundown on trump’s two dumpster candidates (Amy Coney Barrett and Barbara Lagoa) for SCOTUS to replace Justice Ruth Ginsburg. Putting their names in the same sentence as Justice Ruth Ginsburg’s should not diminish her but it does not preclude how low Repubs will stoop to achieve their goals as their power continues to diminish. Trump’s Supreme Court short list includes member of the sect that inspired the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’. The author takes care to assign a name to each detailing their character.
Amy Coney Barrett, “representing The Handmaid’s Tale as societal model wing”
She belong to an extreme, charismatic wing of the Catholic Church called People of Praise, which actually did serve as the inspiration for Margaret Atwood in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The book was published in 1985 after Atwood “delayed writing it for about three years after I got the idea because I felt it was too crazy,” she told The New York Times Book Review in 1986. “Then two things happened. I started noticing that a lot of the things I thought I was more or less making up were now happening, and indeed more of them have happened since the publication of the book.” Specifically: “There is a sect now, a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect, which calls the women handmaids. They don’t go in for polygamy of this kind but they do threaten the handmaids according to the biblical verse I use in the book—sit down and shut up.” Yeah, that’s Barrett’s church. Except they’ve dropped the “head” moniker for male leadership and “handmaids” title for women who keep their fellow women in line because the television series based on the novel forced a change. They are now all called “leaders,” who direct such intimate life decisions of members as who they marry, where they live, and how they raise their children.
Barrett: a “legal career is but a means to an end and to that end, is building the Kingdom of God.” She’s also written that judges shouldn’t necessarily be held to upholding Supreme Court precedents like Roe v. Wade, which she almost certainly would vote to restrict out of existence. Barrett’s religion came up briefly in her confirmation hearing for her current position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein mentioned: “The dogma lives loudly within you,” and the entire Republican world erupted, accusing Feinstein of trying to impose an unconstitutional “religious test” on nominees. The issue pretty much ended there. It can’t end there in hearings should Trump nominate Barrett. That is, if McConnell and Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham don’t just decide to forego hearings and send her straight to the floor. At this point, McConnell could probably get 51 Republican senators to do anything for Trump.
Barrett’s hall mark decision is to deter colleges and universities from vigorously investigating sexual assault allegations by making it easier for students accused of assault to challenge the handling of their cases. Barrett based her decision on reverse gender discrimination, writing in a case against Purdue University: “It is plausible university officials chose to believe Jane because she is a woman and to disbelieve John because he is a man,” turning what might have been a more straightforward due process issue into a gender bias question. So that’s Barrett.
One indication of Barrett’s skew is her response in an article Catholic Judges in Capital Cases After her graduation from Notre Dame, “she explored the effect of the Catholic Church’s teachings on the death penalty on federal judges, and it used the church’s teachings on abortion and euthanasia as a comparison point, describing the prohibitions on abortion and euthanasia as “absolute” because they “take away innocent life.” The article also noted that, when the late Justice William Brennan was asked about potential conflict between his Catholic faith and his duties as a justice, he responded that he would be governed by “the oath I took to support the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Barrett and Garvey observed that they did not “defend this position as the proper response for a Catholic judge to take with respect to abortion or the death penalty.”
Barbara Lagoa, “the quid pro quo choice.”
Rocketing onto the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals courtesy of McConnell’s judicial juggernaut, she is a 52-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles who was born in Miami, Florida. Not only has Trump talked about the great political advantage he could get in Florida with a Supreme Court pick, that is only the beginning quid pro quo. Lagoa is right now considering Trump campaign chief Jason Miller’s $100 million libel lawsuit against Gizmodo. The suit stems from a 2018 report on the now-defunct website Splinter that Miller slipped an abortion pill into a smoothie he gave to a woman he had gotten pregnant. The allegations arose in a custody dispute brought by Trump staffer A.G. Delgado who had a child by Miller. Gizmodo is Splinter’s parent company. A district court judge in Miami threw the suit out a year ago. Miller appealed and now Judge Lagoa is considering it. This leaves one to wonder if she were really worthy of a Supreme Court seat? If so, she should either recuse herself from Miller’s case or she would remove herself from consideration for SCOTUS. Not surprisingly, neither has happened as of yet.
Former Trump Justice official and a member of the Florida Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission said of her, “She is a Cuban woman from Miami, and Florida is the most important state in the election. ” Appointing Judge Lagoa to SCOTUS might be just enough to swing the state into the Repub column with certainty. Hence the importance of her appointment.
Previous cases? For quid pro quo, it does not stop with just the Miller case.
Sixty-five percent of Floridians passed Amendment 4 which repealed a Jim Crow–era constitutional provision that permanently disenfranchised individuals convicted of a felony. The amendment could have restored the franchise to as many as 1.5 million people. In response to Amendment 4, the state legislature passed Senate Bill 7066 (“SB 7066”), which redefined “all terms of sentence” to include the payment of restitution, fines, and fees (also known as “legal financial obligations” or “LFOs”). This followed the normal course through state courts and went to a US District Court where it was struck down. Moving to the 11th District Court of Appeals and in En Blanc session, the COA rejected the US District Courtdecision. Judge Lagoa sat in on and she voted with the majority in a 6-4 decision to overturn the trial judge’s ruling. .
Judge Lagoa had given Trump a “yuge” gift in the recent concurrence of the decision to impose a poll tax on former felons in Florida, preventing as many as 85,000 eligible voters from casting ballots. She has been criticized by Senate Democrats for not recusing herself from the case, a failure which “appears to violate the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.” Given her role last year in an advisory opinion handed down by the Florida Supreme Court in which she participated, one would expect such recusal to be normal. Indeed, Barbara Lagoa (and Robert Luck) took part in oral arguments while serving on the Florida Supreme Court in a case questioning the scope of Amendment 4. Both judges expressed strong opinions about the law during those arguments and should have recused themselves from Jones going forward to forestall questions about impartiality. If they did so, the court would have been evenly divided between Democratic and GOP appointees.
Barrett is a favorite of anti-abortion rights advocates who have been heavily lobbying the White House and Trump personally to nominate her. She is also preferred by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to people close to him. That is it then, McConnell wills it and the choice is in!
McCarter concludes neither is worthy of Justice Ginsburg seat, “Barrett by virtue of her lived rejection of the establishment clause and Lagoa over a proven disregard for ethics.” Both candidates are sponsored by Catholic Fundamentalist Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society who has had his hand in selecting others such as Alito, Roberts, and Gorsuch. Any pronouncement of no influence by the Church or the Federalist Society should be taken as akin to a grain of salt in credibility.
Trump’s Supreme Court short list includes member of the sect that inspired the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’, DAILY KOS, Joan McCarter. September 21, 2020
Florida Can’t Bar Ex-Felons From Voting Just Because They’re Poor, Appeals Court Rules, Slate, February 20, 2020
Profile of a potential nominee: Amy Coney Barrett, SCOTUS Blog, Amy Howe, September 21, 2020
SCOTUS is broken. Unfortunately it would take a constitutional amendment to fix it. Ultimately Roberts is the big loser because he will have been Chief Justice when it all came crashing down.
“By contrast, the 7th Circuit did not bother with those legal tests and upheld John Doe’s Title IX claim using a simple, streamlined analysis: Was it plausible that the university had been biased against him because he was a man? Yes, Barrett and her colleagues decided, allowing John Doe to continue to press his case by sending it back to the trial court.”
The Brett Kavanaugh standard pushed by Lindsey Graham. Believe the accused rapist because he is a man and the accuser is just some hysterical broad. What an abuse of Title IX.
PGL:
Yes and a woman is backing this.
Although I do not believe anyone here is secretly a Democratic Senator using a pseudonym, I’d say this is a kind of demonstration of the messaging choice Democrats face. Is it the process itself that is illegitimate? No need to say anything about the nominee then….basically this is what Republicans did with Garland. Or is the nominee a bad nominee? That argument seems to allow the counterargument that the nominee is a good nominee.
Eric:
It is simple Eric, Republicans as led by McConnell lied to the American people. As McConnell would call out to Democrats the American people want truthful politicians.
2016: McConnell’s Lies: “I believe the overwhelming view of the Republican Conference in the Senate is that this nomination should not be filled, this vacancy should not be filled by this lame duck president.
The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let’s give them a voice. Let’s let the American people decide. The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be.”
“All we are doing is following the long-standing tradition of not fulfilling a nomination in the middle of a presidential year.”
There is no such tradition. The table shows the nine Supreme Court vacancies in place during election years in the Court’s post-Civil War era—once Congress stabilized the Court’s membership at nine and the justices largely stopped serving as trial judges in the old circuit courts. Furthermore McConnell and Republicans care less able the American people. It is the 1-percenters they care able.
2020 McConnell’s Lies:: “Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.”
From the 1890s until the 1950s there were only unified governments, offering no test of whether divided government would have confirmed them. McConnell lies again. Second, McConnell does not include the 1880s’ when there were two divided-government confirmations. There were also two more recent divided-government vacancies which were filled by a divided Senate:
– In 1988, the Democratic-majority Senate voted 97-0 to confirm Justice Kennedy (after the 1987 rejection of the controversial Bork nomination)
– In 1956, Eisenhower made an uncontested October recess appointment of Justice Brennan. Had the Senate been in session, it would have confirmed a Brennan nomination as it did early in 1957.
The problem is you refuse to recognize Republican lies and are trying to justify their actions based upon them. Why do you support a racist bastard in the White House and a Liar in the Senate. We know you support trump, are you a racist, a xenophobe perhaps, support misogynism, etc.? Do you support McConnell’s lies? This is not about a process, It is about politics where none existed before historically and lies. Do you support overt lying by our politicians?
so why did the Dems make a deal with Trump to fund the govt till after the election? it would seem they should have had some leverage there..
rjs – really?
And give the Republicans perhaps a GOOD argument against voting for Democrats.
Good Reason.
Article Six of the United States Constitution … “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” (Wikipedia)
Of the nine, there will soon be six Catholics among the Justices,
one Episcopalian raised as a Catholic, and two Jews.
(Being of some religion seems mandatory,
with one being more favored than others. Perhaps
this is redress for many, many decades with
few or no Catholics on the Court.)
Related: Four went to Harvard Law, four went
to Yale, and the new one went to Notre Dame.
we are talking about an entire branch of government turning neanderthal for a long time, run..
if Pelosi refuses to cooperate with Republicans on stop gap spending over the Supreme Court nominee issue, voters blame Pelosi, not the local candidate for Congress….but lets imagine there is widespread voter anger at the Democrats over a shutdown, and Dems lose 30 seats for 2 years…is that worse than the Supreme Court turning hard right for maybe 25 years?
just a thought…
Sometimes rather than to ask oneself “What would Jesus do,” then instead one might find a more appropriate answer by asking oneself “What would Richard Pryor do?” But, just don’t set your hair on fire in the process.
Richard would have still had plenty of options long after Jesus had run all out of options.
Shutting down the government would have zero effect on a SC nomination.
“Perhaps this is redress for many, many
decades with few or no Catholics on the Court.”
Hardly any Jews in the Court’s history, or
(admitted) atheists either, and of course until
recently, no women or blacks..Many other
minorities un -represented.. A bastion of
white male protestant Christians.
Trump said to pick Amy Coney Barrett for Court
NY Times via @BostonGlobe – September 25
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the favorite candidate of conservatives, to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and will try to force Senate confirmation before Election Day in a move that would significantly alter the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court for years.
Trump plans to announce Saturday that she is his choice, according to people close to the process who asked not to be identified disclosing the decision in advance. The president met with Barrett at the White House this week and came away impressed with a jurist that leading conservatives told him would be a female Antonin Scalia, referring to the justice who died in 2016 and for whom Barrett clerked.
As they often do, aides cautioned that Trump sometimes upends his own plans. But he is not known to have interviewed any other candidates for the post.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Amy Coney Barrett Is an Extremist—Just Not the Kind You Think
via @thenation – September 25
… Donald Trump is planning to nominate Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Barrett is a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and has sat on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since Trump nominated her to that position in 2017. She is a star in conservative legal circles, and she is only 48 years old. Should Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell succeed in ramming through her appointment—an appointment made, no less, in the midst of the 2020 election—she could serve on the Supreme Court into the 2060s.
Barrett’s elevation to this position has been a long time coming. Her nomination has been made with one issue in mind: abortion. The conservative men who have been attacking a woman’s right to choose for a generation have long pined for a woman to do the final work of denying women their right to their own bodies. They’ve said so: Ramesh Ponnuru, longtime editor at National Review and fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has written: “The main reason I favor Barrett, though, is the obvious one: She’s a woman…. If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned—as I certainly hope it will be, as it is an unjust decision with no plausible basis in the Constitution—it would be better if it were not done by only male justices, with every female justice in dissent.”
Barrett will not disappoint conservatives when it comes to abortion. While other jurists hoping to sit on the Supreme Court have at least attempted to be coy with their opposition to Roe v. Wade, Barrett has not. She has said that abortion is “always immoral.” She has said that Roe creates a framework of “abortion on demand” (a patently false claim given that Roe explicitly created a fetal viability standard after which the state was allowed to limit women’s fundamental rights). Barrett has put herself on the record against abortion rights generally, and Roe v. Wade specifically, more than any other person I can think of nominated for the Supreme Court since that decision came out in 1973. …
You can see Barrett’s moral hypocrisy all throughout her judicial opinions. No modern church favors deliberate indifference to human life. Amy Coney Barrett does. In 2019, she dissented from a Seventh Circuit opinion that found that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment protected people in prison from correctional officers firing “warning shots” into a cafeteria. Barrett callously wrote: “The guards may have acted with deliberate indifference to inmate safety by firing warning shots into the ceiling of a crowded cafeteria in the wake of the disturbance.… In the context of prison discipline, however, ‘deliberate indifference’ is not enough.” …
Fred:
A post of yours was in trash. I do not know why, so I restored it.
The inevitable US Senate confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to SCOTUS should serve as a reminder to us that losing is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Run, it appears a comment by Terry on this thread disappeared too, as i came back over here to respond to it…
she had said: SCOTUS is broken. Unfortunately it would take a constitutional amendment to fix it. Ultimately Roberts is the big loser because he will have been Chief Justice when it all came crashing down.
to which i respond:
Terry, it’s not just SCOTUS; the country is broken, and it will take more than a constitutional amendment to fix it. Ultimately we are all big losers because we were under it when it all came crashing down.
Trump announces Amy Coney Barrett as nominee to Supreme Court, setting up battle over judiciary
AP via @BostonGlobe – September 26
Amy Coney … Barrett, recognizing that flags were still lowered in recognition of Ginsburg’s death, said that she would be “mindful of who came before me.” Although they have different judicial philosophies, Barrett praised Ginsburg as a trailblazer for women and for her friendship with Scalia, saying, “She has won the admiration of women across the country and indeed all across the world.”
Within hours of Ginsburg’s death, Trump made clear he would nominate a woman for the seat and later volunteered he was considering five candidates. But Barrett was the early favorite and the only one to meet with Trump.
Barrett has been a judge since 2017, when Trump nominated her to the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But as a longtime University of Notre Dame law professor, she had already established herself as a reliable conservative in the mold of Scalia, for whom she clerked in the late 1990s.
She would be the only justice on the current court not to have received her law degree from an Ivy League school. The eight current justices all attended either Harvard or Yale.
The staunch conservative had become known to Trump in large part after her bitter 2017 appeals court confirmation included allegations that Democrats were attacking her Catholic faith. The president also interviewed her in 2018 for the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, but Trump ultimately chose Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump and his political allies are itching for another fight over Barrett’s faith, seeing it as a political windfall that would backfire on Democrats. Catholic voters in Pennsylvania, in particular, are viewed as a pivotal demographic in the swing state that Biden, also Catholic, is trying to recapture.
While Democrats appear powerless to stop Barrett’s confirmation in the GOP-controlled Senate, they are seeking to use the process to weaken Trump’s reelection chances.
Barrett’s nomination could become a reckoning over abortion, an issue that has divided many Americans so bitterly for almost half a century. The idea of overturning or gutting Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, has animated activists in both parties for decades. Now, with the seemingly decisive shift in the court’s ideological makeup, Democrats hope their voters will turn out in droves because of their frustration with the Barrett pick.
Trump has also increasingly embraced the high court — on which he will have had an outsize hand in reshaping -– as an insurance policy in a close election.
Increases in mail, absentee and early voting brought about by the coronavirus pandemic have already led to a flurry of election litigation, and both Trump and Biden have assembled armies of lawyers to continue the fight once vote-counting begins. Trump has been open about tying his push to name a third justice to the court to a potentially drawn-out court fight to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021. …