Judge Amy Coney Barrett |
A lede in a story covering Senator Dick Blumenthal’s second day questioning of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Barrett correctly reports that the senator “spent most of his allotted half hour Tuesday questioning Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett about her support for an organization that says life begins at fertilization and on her controversial dissent in a gun case.”
At the beginning of his questioning, Blumenthal assured Barrett
that her Catholic faith was not on the questioning chopping block. But it was.
Blumenthal is a master of insinuation, and
pro-abortion-at-any-stage-of-pregnancy-Democrats such as Blumenthal, a
regulator-in-chief Attorney General in Connecticut who unaccountably has
opposed all and every attempt to regulate the abortion industry, is clearly
combative in the presence of Catholics. The anti-Barrett forces, who are
legion, have questioned feverishly Barrett’s association with a Catholic group
regarded as a cult by many progressive ascendant elements in the Democrat
Party.
Blumenthal has not been questioned closely concerning his
own associations with such groups. And, of course, there are in the country some
fervent anti-Catholics who believe – half a century after historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the author of more
than 20 books and President John Kennedy’s biographer, told us that anti-Catholicism
is the oldest prejudice in the United States – that Catholics are
programmatically incapable of permitting their constitutional religious rights
to be discarded by revolutionary progressives.
Blumenthal, not always reckless, who can speak with
the tongue of an angel, knows that he must tread softly in a state heavily
populated by Catholics of all races – second wave Irish, heavily persecuted in
post-potato-famine days, second wave Italians from the poorer sections of
Italy, Hispanics seeking shelter from atheist, pro-socialist communists in
Latin America, and Greek Orthodox Catholics fleeing the sword of Islam, most of
whom still cling faithfully to their bibles and, not surprisingly, to their
guns.
Not everyone in Connecticut is a Harvard graduate who has
overcome the Catholic dogma that sings loudly within them. And not everyone in Blumenthal’s
home state, Connecticut, trusts the police, whom progressive Democrats want to
defund, to arrive in a timely manner on their doorsteps after they have been
called for assistance. In Connecticut, every attempt to cage second amendment
rights after a horrific and murderous assault – the fatal attack by two
parolees on the wife and two children of Dr. William Pettit, now a state
senator, comes to mind – gun sales in the state spike sharply.
On the very last day of her public testimony before the
Judiciary Committee, Blumenthal prepared a cunning trap for Barrett. He asked
her to affirm or “grade precedents” in three prior Supreme Court cases, 1) Brown
v. Board of Education, 2) Loving
v. Virginia, and 3) Griswold v. Connecticut. In 1) the court ruled that that racial
segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, in 2) that laws banning
interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and in 3) that the purchase and use
by married couples of contraceptives
without government restriction was protected by the constitution.
Barrett responded that Brown and Loving had
been correctly decided. She was willing to say so on this occasion because what
she had said “in print, either my scholarly work or in judicial opinions is
fair game,” and she had in the past said that Brown had been correctly decided. However, she declined in the case
of Griswold to “grade precedents,”
that is to give a “thumbs up or down” to rulings she had not commented on-- for
the best of reasons: the canon of judicial ethics forbade her from doing so.
Blumenthal, for 20 years the Attorney General of Connecticut, knew that he was
asking Barrett to violate a judicial Canon; never-the-less, he pressed on,
pulling out all the emotional stops.
“Every time you ask me a question about whether [or not] a
question was correctly decided,” Barrett responded, “I cannot answer that
question because I cannot suggest agreement or disagreement with precedents of
the Supreme Court. All of those precedents bind me now as a Seventh Circuit
judge and were I to be confirmed I would be responsible for applying the law of
stare decisis to all of them.”
According to a piece in National
Review, Blumenthal then asked the judge “to think of how she would feel
as a gay or lesbian American ‘to hear that you can’t answer whether the government
can make it a crime for them to have that relationship, whether the government
can enable people who are happily married to continue that relationship,” at
which point “Barrett pushed back, saying the senator was implying she would
cast a vote to overrule Obergefell [ v. Hodges],” a case in which the high court found that same-sex
couples had a constitutional right to marry.
Her personal
feelings, she had said dozens of times during her testimony, cannot and would
not be permitted to color her prospective decisions on the court. Defendants
and plaintiffs in every court in the land expect judges to apply the law and the Constitution to
their decisions – not their personal preferences.
“I’m not even
expressing a view in disagreement of Obergefell,” Barrett told
Blumenthal, stepping nimbly and properly around a snare that would have
impaired her objective decisions in future cases. “You’re pushing me to try to
violate the judicial Canons of ethics and to offer advisory opinions and I
won’t do that.”
Comments
Bottom line is that much of the Country once you leave the East Coast has a very low regard for us here and especially our politicians. In my opinion, Senators Blumenthal and Murphy are an embarrassment to our State and to our Country and leave me wondering if they have ever read the Constitution or understand it's meaning.