SHE’S CORRUPT, AMORAL, BRIBES SUCKING BUT ISN’T THAT WHY BIDEN WANTED HER TO BE V.P?
SHE’S A SOCIOPATH LAWYER!
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/09/kamala-harris-amoral-corrupt-bribes.html
CITY JOURNAL ON JUDGE
AMY CONEY BARRETT
September
27, 2020
Politics and law
Judge Amy Coney Barrett,
whom President Donald Trump has nominated to fill the Supreme Court vacancy
created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a distinguished scholar
whose judicial philosophy balances a commitment to originalism with a respect
for precedent. Dire predictions circulate about the consequences of
adding another conservative-leaning justice to the Court, but Barrett’s record
suggests that she will do credit to the institution.
In many ways, Barrett’s
resume is a testament to the trail blazed by Ginsburg. Like the late justice,
Barrett graduated at the top of her law school class and served as a judicial
clerk, first for federal appellate judge Laurence Silberman and then for
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. After a stint in private practice,
Barrett joined the faculty at Notre Dame Law School, where she was named
“distinguished professor of the year” three times.
Barrett has earned lavish
praise from colleagues across the ideological spectrum. In 2017, when Trump
nominated Barrett to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, her
Notre Dame colleagues unanimously supported her in a letter to the Senate
Judiciary Committee. The law professors wrote that they had a “wide range of
political views” but were “united however in our judgment about Amy.” She was
also endorsed in a letter signed by every former Supreme Court law clerk who
clerked while Barrett worked for Justice Scalia. The former clerks’ letter
described Barrett as a “woman of remarkable intellect and character,” as
someone who “conducted herself with professionalism, grace, and integrity” and
“was able to work collaboratively with her colleagues (even those with whom she
disagreed) on challenging legal questions.” Barrett was ultimately confirmed to
the Seventh Circuit with bipartisan support.
Now, however, with a
Supreme Court seat in the balance, Barrett has become the subject of
scathing—and misguided—criticism from the left. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus, for example, asserts that Barrett “would not hesitate to
jettison decisions with which she disagrees,” a glaring mischaracterization of
the nominee’s record on adherence to precedent, the principle known as stare decisis. Barrett has in fact defended the Supreme Court’s existing presumption
in favor of stare decisis—a presumption that promotes stability while affording the
justices’ flexibility to depart from precedent.
Before overruling a
precedent, according to Barrett, a Supreme Court justice must “think carefully
about whether she is sure enough about her rationale for overruling to pay the
cost of upsetting institutional investment in the prior approach. If she is not
sure enough, the preference for continuity trumps.” In her academic writings,
Barrett has also recognized the concept of “superprecedents” such as Brown v. Board of Education that enjoy such broad consensus that no
judge would seriously consider overturning them. Barrett’s fidelity to
precedent is evident from cases like Price v. City of Chicago (2019), in which she joined an opinion
relying on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hill v. Colorado (2000) to uphold a Chicago ordinance that bars anti-abortion
protestors from approaching within eight feet of women entering an abortion
clinic. Given her views on stare decisis, it appears unlikely
that Barrett would vote to overturn the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade; however, she would likely be more sympathetic than Ginsburg was
to state laws that limit the unfettered right to abortion on demand. In a 2018
case, Planned Parenthood v. Commissioner,
for example, Barrett joined a dissent that cast doubt on a Seventh Circuit
decision that struck down an Indiana law prohibiting abortions motivated solely
by the race, sex, or disability of the fetus.
As a professor and a
judge, Barrett has been a proponent of textualism, the doctrine that courts
should apply a statute’s text as it was understood by those who enacted the
statute. In constitutional law, this doctrine is better known as
“originalism”—that is, a commitment to the original public meaning of the
Constitution’s various provisions. Barrett’s defense of this interpretive
approach is not a mere pretext to achieve conservative results; rather, it is
based on judicial deference to the democratic process that gives statutes their
legitimacy. Barrett has, for example, criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’s “saving
construction” of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as a tax (NFIB v. Sebelius) because “a judge who adopts an interpretation inconsistent with
the text fails to enforce the statute that commanded majority support. If the
majority did not enact a ‘tax,’ interpreting the statute to impose a tax lacks
democratic legitimacy.”
Barrett’s originalist
approach led her to dissent in the 2019 case Kanter v. Barr in
which the Seventh Circuit upheld federal and state laws that prohibit gun
ownership for people convicted of felonies—even nonviolent felonies. The
plaintiff in that case had been convicted of one count of federal mail fraud
for falsely representing that his company’s therapeutic shoe inserts were
Medicare-approved and for billing Medicare on that basis. In her dissent,
Barrett reviewed Founding-era legislation and commentary, concluding that a
legislature can prohibit violent felons from possessing guns without violating
the Second Amendment, but a blanket dispossession of all felons goes too far.
Perhaps Barrett’s most
influential ruling to date came in Doe v. Purdue University (2019), in which she led a decision
reinstating a lawsuit against Purdue University by a male student who had been
suspended for committing sexual violence against a female student. The student,
known as John Doe, alleged that Purdue’s Dean of Students had found him guilty
without ever speaking to his accuser and that a university review committee
also blindly accepted the accuser’s account without hearing from John or
allowing him to present any evidence. Writing for a unanimous panel of three
judges —all women—Barrett wrote that Doe had stated a plausible claim that he
had been “denied an educational benefit on the basis of his sex” in violation
of Title IX. The court also held that Doe’s allegations stated a claim for
violation of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. “Purdue’s process,”
Barrett wrote, “fell short of what even a high school must provide to a student
facing a days-long suspension.” The Purdue decision, already widely cited in
other circuits, shows a clear-eyed skepticism about lopsided college
disciplinary procedures that have been criticized by experts on the right and
left, including the late Justice Ginsburg.
With an election just
weeks away, the timing of Barrett’s nomination has predictably provoked
controversy. But today’s political squabbles should not overshadow the
intellect and judicial temperament that make her a superb choice for the high
court.
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