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| Schumer, Blumenthal and Murphy |
Last Saturday, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal tweeted, “I will
refuse to treat this process,” the elevation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the
U.S. Supreme Court, “as legitimate & will not meet with Judge Amy Coney
Barrett.”
This is what snooty rich people in Blumenthal’s circle
would call a slight. One expects to find this sort of thing in an exclusive
British club, or a golf course that has perversely refused to admit Jews.
The story concerning Blumenthal’s oh so significant public slight,
was featured in CTMirror under the title “Trump
slams Barrett critic Blumenthal, says senator should be ‘impeached’” As the title and emphasis of the story
suggests, President Donald Trump has returned slight for slight.
Trump, on cue,
reacted almost immediately to Blumenthal’s intentionally offensive manners by
recalling in yet another tweet that Blumenthal had several times in different
formats strongly suggested he had served in the Vietnam War, a boast that was a
brazen lie. The boasts – there were several – were a succession of lies because
to lie is knowingly to say the thing that is not, and Blumenthal could not have
forgotten his service as a marine in Washington DC, which is 8,756 miles from
Vietnam. Marines may occasionally forget to toss their dirty socks into the
hamper, but they do not forget their honorable service in defense of their
country.
The CTMirror
reporter noted in her story, “As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
which will vet Barrett’s candidacy for the high court, Blumenthal would
normally receive a private, ‘courtesy meeting’ with the nominee before her
confirmation hearing.”
So then, the refusal
to meet with Barrett was an intentional discourtesy to the nominee, simply a
way of saying to Barrett – an accomplished judge, a talented and resourceful
woman, at least in this respect very much like revered Superior Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a mother of seven children, two of them Haitian adoptees,
a practicing Catholic, a law professor much admired by her students – you are
invisible to me; and if you are appointed to the Supreme Court, I will regard
you in the future as an illegitimate Supreme Court Judge.
Blumenthal later
explained, according to another
story in the same paper,
that there was only one nomination he was inclined to support, that of Judge
Merrick Garland, whose nomination by then President Barrack Obama to the
Supreme Court bench died on the vine in a Republican dominated U.S. Senate.
Blumenthal
acknowledged he was speaking theoretically – “We’re talking a very
hypothetical; it’s not going to happen" -- and even facetiously. However,
his facile dismissal was directed at Barrett, and the reason he gave for
refusing to meet with her did not hold water. Blumenthal extended the courtesy
of a pre- judiciary hearing meeting to two other Trump Supreme Court nominees,
judges Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both of whom were seated following the
usual Democrat barbed wire interrogatories – AFTER the Republican dominated
Senate refused to entertain President Barack Obama’s nomination of Garland to
the court.
It was the
presidential election of 2016 that had decided the course of action on the
Garland nomination. Had Hillary Clinton won the election, and had Democrats
captured the U.S. Senate, Garland likely would have been elevated to the Court.
Elections, as the political pundits sometimes say, have consequences. It is Majority
Leader of the Senate Mitch McConnell, not Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi,
who passes on nominations to the Supreme Court.
During the Garland
nomination, the Senate was controlled by Republicans, not Democrats. The sitting
president is constitutionally obligated to fill vacancies on the court; the Senate
is constitutionally obligated to vote on presidential nominations, though the Senate
may, and has in the past, choose to delay a vote without destroying
constitutional equipoise.
The Republican
Senate declined to take up the Garland nomination and later filled originalist
Justice Antonin Scalia’s vacated seat with Gorsuch. All this was according to
Hoyle. During his meeting with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, Blumenthal was as gracious
as his brittle temperament allowed. But in Barrett’s case, graciousness was
prematurely and bizarrely withdrawn. Hoyle himself, after reviewing
Democrat reaction to the recent Republican nominations to the court of Robert
Bork, Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, would bet that Barrett will not
escape the expected Democrat whipping
So then, what is the
irritant in Blumenthal’s craw? We sometimes forget that it was a
pre-presidential Trump who desegregated a country club that had refused to
admit Jews, a Presidential Trump who warmly embraced the marriage of his
daughter to Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law who recently arranged a
peace concordat between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, a presidential Trump
who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem -- all measures that should gladden the
hearts of Jews in Connecticut, including Blumenthal.
Nietzsche perhaps
offers a hint: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss
will gaze back into you.”
Barrett then may be
a victim of Blumenthal’s dizziness. She is without doubt a big enough woman to
forgive Blumenthal his slight but not, one hopes, his dizzying rhetorical sleight
of hand.
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