Senate confirmation Monday of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is a win for all of America, and couldn’t come at a more critical time.
Barrett’s scholarship, record on the bench and confirmation testimony show she has the “deep legal expertise, dispassionate judicial temperament and sheer intellectual horsepower” Americans deserve in Supreme Court justices, as Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it.
And though Democrats opposed her, they didn’t convince anyone — indeed, her public support grew throughout the process.
This, in a nation beset by deep political division, with a presidential campaign adding to the flames. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death left the court with just eight votes, raising the possibility of deadlocks, even as a wave of litigation over mail-in voting makes it more likely the court will have to decide election-related cases. As Ginsburg, a liberal hero, herself argued, “Eight is not a good number for a collegial body that sometimes disagrees.”
Ironically, Dems say the timing is wrong, that a new prez might pick someone else, so President Trump shouldn’t have tapped Barrett. Yet presidents since the birth of the republic have routinely named candidates for high-court vacancies in such election years.
Dems’ real gripe is that Barrett will stick carefully to the actual text of the Constitution and the law in her rulings, instead of stretching them to serve the left’s agenda.
After all, they were fine with President Barack Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, in 2016. As Ginsburg noted: A president is “elected for four years, not three years.” She hoped senators would “wake up and appreciate that that’s how it should be.”
Democrats’ only real “argument” was phony fearmongering about how Barrett might nix liberal priorities like ObamaCare and Roe v. Wade. Yet she’s given no sign she’d do any such thing — only that she’d rule on the facts and the law. Amid the political turmoil, that’s reassuring.