Describing (on day two) what was happening at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing as comparable to a puppet theater, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse offered a backgrounder on “a $250 million dark money operation” that led to the Amy Coney Barrett nomination.
He jabs three Republican members of the committee, Senators Chuck Grassley, Ted Cruz, and Chairman Lindsey Graham, as well as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for their “hard-to-explain hypocrisy” (though, of course, unprincipled political opportunism and the embrace of raw political power is not all that hard to explain). He also punctures the charade that Republicans have performed each day at the hearing: that Democrats’ attention to Roe v. Wade, Obergefell, and numerous Obamacare cases is inexplicable, since Amy Coney Barrett has pledged to rule fairly, without any bias except a commitment to the letter of the law, in whichever cases she is presented with as a justice.
Senator Whitehouse and his colleagues know that the idea of Barrett as a blank slate is ludicrous, no matter how much Republicans pretend otherwise. These cases have been in the crosshairs of the conservative legal movement, the party’s conservative evangelical base, and Republican elected officials since each of the respective SCOTUS rulings were handed down. The right to abortion, to gay marriage, to affordable healthcare — even when one has preconditions that before the ACA would have precluded having health insurance — are at stake.
In each case, the GOP has fought fiercely to overturn the ‘liberal’ rulings, yet in the hearings this week, Republican senators appeared baffled at the idea that somehow confirming the Notre Dame professor as a justice would lead to any reversals, much less any real world consequences. But of course, Professor Barrett was chosen because there is in her record virtually no wavering from the party line — championed with immense infusions of corporate dollars — on any of these issues (or any others to which the GOP and its donor base are committed).
While illustrating the connections between deep-pocketed right-wing foundations, huge corporations, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the Judicial Crisis Network, the Federalist Society, and the Trump White House, the senator explained the “scheme with the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges, and then showing up in court in these orchestrated amicus flotillas to tell the judges what to do.”
The lesson on a very impressive, highly successful decades-long campaign by corporate interests to capture the federal courts is much more illuminating than 28 minutes of Q & A with the nominee would have been.
The transcript is available from the Center for Media and Democracy, but it’s worthwhile to watch the presentation, which included helpful visual aids.