The Reason Amy Coney Barrett May Have Been Chosen
Lauren Martinchek at Medium magazine has a brief article suggesting there is another reason why trump chose Amy to be the next SCOTUS Justice and why Republicans are in such a hurry to nominate her. It is an alarmist viewpoint; however, it does have a foundation to it and has merit for her to claim it. This may be old news to some readers.
Pulling from the Washington Post, Beth Reinhard and Tom Hamburger lay the foundation from which Lauren lays out some of the detail.
“Amy Coney Barrett was just three years out of law school, a 28-year-old associate at a boutique Washington law firm, when she was dispatched to Florida to help George W. Bush’s legal team rescue thousands of Republican absentee ballots.
At issue were thousands of absentee ballot request forms in Martin County — just north of Palm Beach County, home of the notorious “butterfly ballot” — that had missing voter registration information.
After county officials allowed the GOP to take the forms back and fill in the missing information, a Democratic voter sued, saying ballots cast by those voters should be tossed out. The county canvassing board, the Florida Republican Party and the Bush campaign argued that the votes should still count.
As both parties brace for the possibility of another contested election that Trump has suggested could go to the high court, the previously unreported role of his Supreme Court nominee in the absentee ballot fight is more than a historical footnote. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh also played a role in Bush v. Gore, it js meaning that if Barrett is confirmed, three of the nine justices will have participated in litigation related to the only presidential contest to be decided by the high court.
And then goes on to say; Donald Trump does not care about whether or not someone chooses to get an abortion. He does not care about health insurance, or a companies ability to deny you coverage based on a pre-existing condition. At this point it feels almost trivial, even mundane to point out that all that motivates him is money, and the preservation of his own personal power. As we grow closer and closer to an election the President has already said he will take to the courts if necessary in order to ensure the outcome is in his favor. Can we really be surprised his selection for the Supreme Court is a woman who was on the frontlines giving him the blueprint on how to do it?
For Donald Trump, there was only one litmus test Amy Coney Barrett needed to pass, which she passed it at 28 years old, and before she was even a Judge.
A safe conclusion we could draw is, the moment Donald Trump learned Barrett helped to steal the 2000 election for George Bush was the moment he decided she was the one for SCOTUS. If the election is even remotely close and ultimately ends up in the Supreme Court as he hopes it will, he could not have chosen a more surefire guarantee of his pick working in his favor when the time comes.
I would think, the election does not have to be close. There just has to be controversy for him to run to SCOTUS and seek coverage from his picks. And what of McConnell?
How Amy Coney Barrett played a role in Bush v. Gore?, Beth Reinhard and Tom Hamburger, WaPo, October 10, 2020
The Real Reason Trump Chose Amy Coney Barrett, Lauren Martinchek, Medium, October 15, 2020
Next time that we have the chance then we really need to hang that Chad guy and his entire family of ballot killers.
Ron:
This is going to be a fight even if Biden wins over whelmingly.
[Understood – but the legal battle may be inconsequential compared to the civil war that will ensue.]
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/24/politics/election-day-preparations-law-enforcement/index.html
How the country’s law enforcement is bracing for Election Day
By Vivian Salama, CNN
Updated 10:02 AM ET, Sat October 24, 2020
(CNN)Secret Service officers are getting new laser-blocking sunglasses. LaFayette Park, that iconic center of protest, has been fenced off months before the usual Inauguration Day shut down.
And within the White House gates, aides to President Donald Trump have held more than five dozen meetings to discuss contingency planning for the hours and days after the polls close, according to administration officials who requested anonymity to discuss the secretive plans.
City and federal authorities across the country, anticipating the high potential for unrest in the hours and days following this year’s election, are making contingency plans for “worst-case scenarios,” particularly if there is no clear winner come November 4. That includes — in Washington, the capital — reinforcing officers with new equipment and holding training drills that ensure law enforcement is prepared to quell any violence or looting that might occur, while also protecting people’s right to protest, said a city official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. The stepped-up training schedules are in anticipation of the election, the official said.
The immediate perimeters around the White House have been largely blocked off to the public this year for a range of reasons, from construction on the White House gate, to protests and looting that occurred in downtown Washington in the wake of the death of George Floyd this summer. Lafayette Park, across the street from the north side of the White House and a popular protest gathering spot, has also largely been fenced-in since police aggressively moved in on protesters alongside it in July.
That is likely to continue in the coming weeks as federal authorities look to keep the public as far from the White House gates as possible.
This year’s unprecedented circumstances, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the uptick in civil unrest in cities across America, coupled with a hyper-polarized political landscape, has federal and local law enforcement officials bracing for mass protests that could potentially spin out of control.
Trump has for months sought to undermine the integrity of mail-in ballots and that of the upcoming election — particularly, in the event he loses to former Vice President Joe Biden. But experts say the Constitution supersedes individuals, and law enforcement will be ready to protect the Constitution should the election result in a Biden win.
“It’s career government officials who enact the change, and so the transfer of power will happen whether the President likes it or not,” said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and now, head of Global Security for Teneo, a security consultancy.
Several federal and city law enforcement officials described similar scenarios to CNN to explain how they are planning for November 3 deployments… *
[Trump must go and feet first works for me.]
I guess it is Mike Pence that is playing Peachy Carnehan to Donald Trump’s role of Danny Dravot. Kipling was no fool.
Ron:
Before I left home in 68 and never to return until I was out and released from other obligations, I was reminded by my brothers and sister of what I had read and how they had ransacked the books I left behind. I tend to forget where I had traveled by turning pages. I spent a week in a community hospital in the area where patients were put who were not expected to live rereading a “Tale of Two Cities.” My boss thought such a choice was remarkable and I never gave it a thought. I could not leave my bed or my room. On a reoccurrence of the same malady, I was out an about over the three+ weeks confined to a hospital. One of the blood doctors was always chirping at me; “If you bump your head, we will never get to you in time to stop the bleeding” and when I was reading on my laptop, he was chirping “Are you on that thing again?” My simple reply other than f*ck off was “this is my newspaper.”
I suspect Pence is a kling-on to trump’s anus. He really has no role assigned by trump who would not yield a bit of power to him. He is just there filling a space as detailed by the constitution. Pence plays Milton to trump’s Small.
That would make the US Constitution the innocent young girl than Danny intends to violate. Close enough for government work.
We Were Clerks at the Supreme Court. Its Legitimacy Is Now in Question
NY Times – Jamie Crooks and Samir Deger-Sen – October 25
We are lawyers who clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, a lifelong conservative appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan. We urge the Senate not to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett or any nominee until after the presidential election. Rushing through a confirmation with an election underway threatens the very legitimacy of the court.
Those lucky enough to interview for clerkships at the Supreme Court anticipate, or perhaps dread, a spirited debate on difficult jurisprudential issues. But the first question Justice Kennedy asked us both — and, we’d learn, all prospective clerks — had nothing to do with legal doctrine: “So, how are we doing?” It was perplexing at first to realize he cared less about our knowledge of legal particulars than about gauging how the court was perceived beyond its marble walls.
What we’d come to appreciate after a year working alongside him was that, far from just a friendly icebreaker, Justice Kennedy’s question revealed his understanding of a profound but often overlooked truth: The court’s influence extends only as far as its perceived legitimacy. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the judiciary “has no influence over either sword or the purse.” If the court wants the people to obey its rulings, it must depend on “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” In other words, Supreme Court pronouncements are a dead letter unless the public accepts them as the law.
For his nearly two decades at the court’s center, Justice Kennedy understood this. Though he rejected the label of “swing justice,” it certainly fit: His opinions controlled cases that traversed our country’s deepest divides — on race, abortion, gay rights and campaign finance. Yet the judgments the court rendered during his tenure, while almost always drawing ire from one political faction or another, were accepted as legitimate. Al Gore conceded the day Bush v. Gore was decided. There was no latter day George Wallace blocking couples from the courthouse after the Obergefell decision guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage. For other government officials and the public, these decisions were understood to be final — not because the court is infallible, but because its judgments resulted from a process perceived as legitimate.
That fragile but crucial public acceptance was hard won over decades of compromises within and between each branch of government. But if Senate Republicans hastily confirm Judge Barrett in the middle of an election, when a clear majority of Americans would prefer that Congress focus on the nation’s economic recovery, that earned legitimacy will be put in jeopardy.
With Judge Merrick Garland denied even a hearing by Republicans after his nomination by President Barack Obama, and now the rush by those same Republicans to confirm Judge Barrett, the court’s very composition will be seen as a product of the most brazen kind of politics. We fear its decisions will be seen that way too.
That’s why the Republicans’ strategy of forcing through this nomination is shortsighted and may ultimately be self-defeating. The current court is, despite occasional hand-wringing on the right over a decision or two, the most conservative this nation has had in nearly a century. Yet each time it has delivered significant conservative victories — such as Citizens United, which struck down key campaign finance limits, written by our former boss in 2010 — liberals accepted the outcome as the law of the land.
But it is wrong to think that such acquiescence is guaranteed. Just consider calls among Democrats to increase the size of the court if they win the election.
Now we face a situation that Democrats may understandably find near impossible to swallow: a Supreme Court vacancy being filled the week before a presidential election, by a minority-elected president facing an improbable re-election and a Senate that denied President Obama (who was popularly elected twice) the right to fill a seat in an almost identical situation.
We’re liberals. But we’re also institutionalists. We don’t urge postponing Judge Barrett’s confirmation because of her qualifications or originalist philosophy, and we don’t question the sincerity of her promise to approach each case impartially. Our concerns run deeper — that regardless of how or why Justice Barrett would vote on the momentous issues that would come before her, the court’s decisions won’t be accepted.
We worry that a large swath of the nation, told a Democrat can’t fill a vacancy in an election year but a Republican can, will dismiss the court as yet another partisan body. And we worry that if our children are asked, years from now, “How is the court doing?” their answer will turn on which politicians last got their hands on it, and not the reasoning behind the court’s judgments.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-gop/616727/
What the Rush to Confirm Amy Coney Barrett Is Really About
The Republican Party wants to shield itself from the growing Democratic coalition.
Ronald Brownstein
October 15, 2020
Nothing better explains the Republican rush to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court than the record crowds that thronged polling places for the first days of early voting this week in Georgia and Texas.
The historic number of Americans who stood in long lines to cast their ballot in cities from Atlanta to Houston symbolizes the diverse, urbanized Democratic coalition that will make it very difficult for the GOP to win majority support in elections through the 2020s. That hill will get only steeper as Millennials and Generation Z grow through the decade to become the largest generations in the electorate.
Every young conservative judge that the GOP has stacked onto the federal courts amounts to a sandbag against that rising demographic wave. Trump’s nominations to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Barrett—whom a slim majority of Republican senators appears determined to seat by Election Day—represent the capstone of that strategy. As the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity limits the GOP’s prospects, filling the courts with conservatives constitutes what the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz calls “the right-wing firewall” against a country evolving electorally away from the party.
This dynamic suggests that the 2020s could reprise earlier conflicts in American history, when a Court majority nominated and confirmed by the dominant party of a previous era systematically blocked the agenda of a newly emerging political majority—with explosive consequences. That happened as far back as the first years of the 19th century, when electoral dominance tipped from John Adams and the Federalists to Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party. At the time—and in language today’s Democrats would recognize—Jefferson complained that the Federalists “have retreated into the judiciary as a stronghold … the tenure of which renders it difficult to dislodge them.”
Some lag time between the composition of the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, and the country’s electoral balance is built into the constitutional system, with federal judges receiving lifetime appointments…
Sad day for our democracy.
” This Is What It Feels Like to Live Under Minority Rule
The powerlessness is the point.
I have been thinking a good deal about the creeping cynicism that comes with this kind of powerlessness. And it is easy to feel powerless when you are constantly being told that the powerful will decide what matters, and also that they alone will determine what you can know about that decision. The stripping of power is part of the project. Senate Democrats never had any real power to stop the coronation of Amy Coney Barrett, but when they did try something — boycotting Thursday’s Judiciary Committee vote on Barrett — Lindsey Graham changed the quorum rules to push the vote through regardless. Before her 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seat is even empty, the White House has announced a nomination to fill it, just like the GOP announced that it had the votes to confirm a judge before she was even named. Her name was extraneous information for us, because we were powerless to stop the nomination. It’s hard to know what to do in the face of this kind of behavior that kneecaps opposition and grabs power wherever possible. It leads to the sense that perhaps one should do nothing…..
“That’s where the fight lies. In understanding that however systemic the suppression of truth and trust might feel, there are still more of you than there are of them. The effort to say you are nothing and deserve nothing isn’t actually erasure. It’s actually their fear showing. And that fear in turn suggests that you still have more power than you may know.”
https://slate.com/news-and-…