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| Gorsuch and Blumenthal |
The title of the news report was, “Sen. Richard Blumenthal makes last-ditch effort to delay Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but Republicans prevail on party-line vote.”
Blumenthal’s last stand occurred following the termination
of the Senate public hearing convened to pass on Amy Coney Barrett’s fitness to
serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barrett’s elevation to the high court is a virtual
certainty, since Democrats in the Senate do not have the votes to block her
admission to the court.
Unlike Custer’s last stand, Blumenthal’s occurred on an empty battlefield. And Barrett, who already had been through Blumenthal’s drill, certainly will not respond publicly in the pages of the Hartford paper to issues Blumenthal had previously raised in the public Senate hearing, exhaustively covered by the anti-Barrett media.
During her public hearing, Barrett was peppered with
questions from Blumenthal and others that she wisely chose not to answer.
At one point in the public hearing, a polite and mild
mannered Barrett, sensing the snare tightening around her ankle, told
Blumenthal, “Every time you ask me a question about whether [or not] a question
was correctly decided, 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.”
Blumenthal tightened the snare. He asked Barrett 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.
“I’m not even expressing a view in disagreement of Obergefell,”
Barrett said, stepping nimbly and properly around a cheap trap 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.”
Blumenthal, having stoked the fires of resentment among
gays, folded his tent and hobbled off the battlefield.
But he would live to fight another day, when Barrett was not present to challenge his discreditable political tactics.
No recent nominee to
the Supreme Court, originalist or not, has answered the kinds of questions put
by Blumenthal to Barrett -- because in answering such speculative and
hypothetical questions on abortion or gay rights as Barrett correctly refused
to field, the prospective justice would not thereafter be free to decide such
questions should he or she be elevated to the Supreme Court – very likely in
Barrett’s case, much to Blumenthal’s chagrin.
There are highly relevant questions Connecticut’s
deferential media has not and will not put to Blumenthal, a progressive
white-hatter.
Blumenthal had said that Barrett, should she become an
Associate Justice, must recuse herself from making decisions on the high court
involving election laws because President Donald Trump, who had nominated her
to the court, might become involved in suits concerning ballot impropriety. Put
aside for the moment that recusal and presidential court nominations are wholly
unrelated, an obvious question raises its horned head: Why didn't Blumenthal at
the same time call for the recusal of two other Associate Justices nominated
to the court by Trump, Brett Kavanagh and Neil Gorsuch, both male Associate
Justices?
The objections raised by Blumenthal against Barrett, all
swirl around originalism -- a mode of Constitutional interpretation different in kind
from conservatism, a political worldview and another of Blumenthal’s bugbears.
Blumenthal made use of the Barrett snares in his 2017
Gorsuch interrogatories.
Here is a 2017 report from CTMirror on
Blumenthal’s interrogation of Gorsuch:
On Griswold v.
Connecticut, a 1965 decision that overturned the state’s ban on contraceptives
for married couples and bolstered Americans’ right to privacy, Gorsuch said,
“It has been repeatedly reaffirmed.”
Pressed by Blumenthal
to give an opinion on the case, Gorsuch demurred.
“My personal views
have nothing to do with my job as a judge,” he said.
On Eisenstadt v Baird,
which established the right of unmarried people to possess contraceptives,
Gorsuch said, “To say I agree or disagree with the United States Supreme Court
as a judge is an act of hubris.”
“Precedent is more
important than what I think, and my agreement or disagreement doesn’t add
weight towards it,” Gorsuch said.
Gorsuch called
Loving v Virginia, which ruled that banning interracial marriage is
unconstitutional, “a seminal, important vindication of the original meaning of
the Equal Protection Clause.”
But he said little
else.
“I’m drawing the same
line that Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsberg, (David) Souter and (Antonin) Scalia…
Many, many people who have sat at this confirmation table and declined to
offer their personal views on this or that precedent,” he said.
Of Lawrence v. Texas,
which held the government can’t criminalize gay and lesbian relationships,
Gorsuch said, “I’m going to give you the same answer every time.”
Blumenthal also failed
to secure Gorsuch’s personal opinion on a couple of key abortion rights cases,
Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
A frustrated
Blumenthal told Gorsuch, “Your declining to be more direct leaves doubt in the
minds of millions of Americans.”
But Gorsuch said it
was important to hide his views.
“If I start suggesting
that I prefer or not or like this or that precedent, I’m sending a signal, a ‘promise
of preview,’ as Justice Ginsberg called it, about how I would rule in the
future,” he said.
He said Blumenthal,
and other senators, are grilling him on issues that are “very live with
controversy, which is why you are asking about them.”
When Blumenthal questioned Barrett, he was simply retracing
well-worn old ground.
In the Barrett stories, it has rarely, if at all, been mentioned that
Gorsuch, an originalist Associate Justice elevated to the high court by Trump,
wrote the single most important Supreme Court
decision on gays, a ruling that brings gays under the ironclad shield
of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Why isn’t this telling but inconvenient datum mentioned in every
story that displays Blumenthal’s always cleverly buried axiom that originalists
appointed to the high court are bound by their originalism to issue decrees
shoving gays back into the closet?
Why, to put the question in other terms, is Blumenthal
consistently treated by Connecticut’s media with the solicitude one reserves
for holy icons when, in fact, he has shown himself, time and again, to be a
work-a-day progressive Democrat hack afflicted with an unquenchable lust for favorable publicity?
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