Tag Archives: Amy Coney Barrett

Writers, Publishers and Editors Call for Termination of Barrett Book Deal in Latest Censorship Campaign, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on October 30, 2022 | Leave a comment

Now they want to cancel a Supreme Court justice. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

We have been discussing the rising support for censorship on the left in the last few years. Silencing opposing views has become an article of faith for many on the left, including leading Democratic leaders from President Joe Biden to former President Barack Obama. What is most distressing is how many journalists and writers have joined the call for censorship. However, even with this growing movement, the letter of hundreds of “literary figures” this week to Penguin Random House is chilling. The editors and writers call on the company to rescind a book deal with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett because they disagree with her judicial philosophy. After all, why burn books when you can effectivelyban them?

The public letter entitled “We Dissent” makes the usual absurd protestation that, just because we are seeking to ban books of those with opposing views, we still “care deeply about freedom of speech.” They simply justify their anti-free speech position by insisting that any harm “in the form of censorship” is less than “the form of assault on inalienable human rights” in opposing abortion or other constitutional rights.

Yet, the letter is not simply dangerous. It is perfectly delusional. While calling for the book to be blocked, the writers bizarrely insist “we are not calling for censorship.”

While the letter has been described as signed by “literary figures,” it actually contains many who are loosely connected to the “broader literary community”  like  “Philip Tuley, Imam” and “Barbara Hirsch, Avid reader.” It also includes many who are simply identified by initials or first names like “Leslie” without any stated connection.

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Are Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett feeling the threat of expansion?

Posted on July 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

Are Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Roberts trimming their sails because they’re afraid of Democratic court-packing schemes? From technofog at technofog.substack.com:

Questioning their lack of fortitude.
Supreme Court is about to have 3 Bush v. Gore alumni sitting on the bench - CNNPolitics

Law professor (and prolific writer) Josh Blackman has an interesting piece in Newsweek, where he observes that Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch have “warned that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett lack backbone.”

He provides as an example the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, in which the Court was presented with the question of whether the City of Philadelphia violated the First Amendment after it stopped referring foster children to a Catholic foster care agency after the agency “would not certify same-sex couples to be foster parents due to its religious beliefs about marriage.”

Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch were ready to overturn Supreme Court arguably incorrect precedent (dating back to 1990) that “the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause tolerates any rule that categorically prohibits or commands specified conduct so long as it does not target religious practice.”

Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett weren’t willing to take that step. (In its February 2021 decision, the Supreme Court held the City of Philadelphia violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment but the Court did not go far enough for religious freedom advocates.)

Justice Gorsuch, in his concurring opinion, called out the Court’s lack of courage:

“Dodging the question today guarantees These cases will keep coming until the Court musters the fortitude to supply an answer.”

Blackman notes this “personal attack no doubt reflects simmering tensions within the Court.”

He also observes how Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh (contrary to Thomas and Gorsuch and Alito) argued that California’s singing ban on churches could remain in place during the COVID pandemic. Barrett “thus used her first separate writing on the Court to rule against people of faith.”

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Shame on the Girl Scouts: Thin Skin instead of Thin Mints, by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted on October 31, 2020 | Leave a comment

This is insane. From Alan M. Dershowitz at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • The Tweet was anything but partisan or political. It was a girl’s organization dedicated to educating young women about their unlimited possibilities in life. The Tweet itself was innocuous. Here is what it said: “Congratulations Amy Coney Barrett on becoming the 5th woman appointed to the Supreme Court since its inception in 1789.”
  • When the Girl Scouts can’t even congratulate a woman for helping to break a longstanding glass ceiling, we know that we are in trouble.
  • The reason I am so angry at the Girl Scouts’ decision to withdraw their original Tweet is that it is a reflection of the divisive nature of our nation and the growing intolerance, particularly by the hard left, of dissenting speech that is seen as supporting the other side.
The Girl Scouts’ decision to withdraw their original Tweet…is a reflection of…the growing intolerance, particularly by the hard left, of dissenting speech that is seen as supporting the other side. (Photo by NOVA SAFO/AFP via Getty Images)

I don’t know why I am so mad at the Girl Scouts for having withdrawn their Tweet congratulating Justice Amy Coney Barrett for being the fifth woman nominated to the Supreme Court in its long history. The Tweet was anything but partisan or political. It was a girl’s organization dedicated to educating young women about their unlimited possibilities in life. The Tweet itself was innocuous. Here is what it said: “”Congratulations Amy Coney Barrett on becoming the 5th woman appointed to the Supreme Court since its inception in 1789.”

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Franklin’s Rule: How The Barrett Hearing Left The Democrats Holding An Empty Sack, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on October 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

The Democrats didn’t succeed in the Barrett hearings in doing anything but making themselves look like asses, and Barrett will get confirmed this week. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

Below is my column in the Hill on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett and the oddly disconnected questions during her confirmation hearing.  While I have written about the revealing moments of the hearing, the Democrats clearly elected not to focus on the nominee but the election. When they did attack the nominee, they fired wildly and missed completely in three areas.

Here is the column:

Benjamin Franklin once said, “it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.” It took almost 300 years, but Franklin’s observation finally has been proven demonstrably true. The three-day Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for federal appellate judge and Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett can best be described as an empty-sack confirmation that simply would not stand upright.

From the outset, committee Democrats were dealing with a highly qualified nominee who has the intellect, the temperament and the background to be an exceptional justice. And that was the problem.

Democrats decided to use the hearing as a springboard for the coming election. They never intended to put anything in the sack against Barrett. Yet, to frame this effort, they advanced a number of false premises that collapsed on their own weight:

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is about to be killed

Barrett was surrounded in the hearing room by photos of ill individuals who could perish without national health care. It made Barrett look like some judicial serial-killer.  However, these were not her victims. Indeed, the entire premise was false.

Senate Democrats were suggesting that the pending case of California v. Texas was just one vote shy of striking down the ACA. It left many of us watching in disbelief. While a district court struck down the whole act, an appellate court wanted to send it back to consider the elements of “severability.” The vast majority of experts believe that the striking down of one provision — the individual mandate provision — should not result in the loss of the entire act. More importantly, a clear majority of the Supreme Court appears to believe that. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh both are expected to vote to uphold the rest of the act. Indeed, a Justice Barrett could well vote with them.

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Another Phony Conservative Judge Nominated To The Supreme Court, by Chuck Baldwin

Posted on October 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

Is Amy Coney Barrett just another “Big Government, Police State ideologue”? From Chuck Baldwin at chuckbaldwinlive.com:

Evangelicals, conservatives and pro-lifers are dancing with glee over Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the U.S. Supreme Court. They shouldn’t be. Once again, conservatives are being conned.

I keep reminding people that SCOTUS has been dominated by Republican appointments since before the infamous Roe v Wade decision in 1973. We are talking a half-century.

Here is the breakdown of how justices voted on Roe back in 1973. The vote was 7 in support and 2 opposed. The list of the votes of the nine justices on the Supreme Court in the Roe v. Wade decision and who appointed them is as follows:

In support:

*Harry Blackmun (Richard M. Nixon, R)
*Warren Burger (Richard M. Nixon, R)
*William Douglas (Franklin D. Roosevelt, D)
*William Brennan Jr. (Dwight D. Eisenhower, R)
*Potter Stewart (Dwight D. Eisenhower, R)
*Thurgood Marshall (Lyndon Baines Johnson, D)
*Lewis Powell Jr. (Richard M. Nixon, R)

In opposition:

*Byron White (John F. Kennedy, D)
*William Rehnquist (Richard M. Nixon, R)

As you can see, GOP appointments had a 6 – 3 majority when the Roe decision was decided. Note that 5 of those 6 Republican-appointed justices voted in favor of Roe. They didn’t even need a Democrat-appointed justice to vote for Roe (which 2 did) in order for it to pass. Notice, too, that only one Republican-appointed justice voted against Roe. To put it another way: 66% of the Democrat-appointed justices voted for Roe, while 83% of the Republican-appointed justices voted for Roe.

And, again, remember that the Republican Party has held a majority of the Supreme Court for 50 years, and yet Roe has never been overturned. And Trump’s appointments are going to prove to be no better.

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Can the Government Force Us to Eat Broccoli?

Posted on October 1, 2020 | Leave a comment

By Andrew P. Napolitano

The Supreme Court’s decisions upholding Obamacare in 2012 was a travesty, and that decision by itself makes Chief Justice John Roberts one of worst Chief Justices ever. From Andrew Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

“The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people.”
— Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980)

With President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — is back in the news. Barrett expressed constitutional misgivings about Obamacare 10 years ago when she was a professor at Notre Dame Law School, and some folks who oppose her nomination have argued that should she be confirmed in the next month, she should not hear the Nov. 10 arguments on Obamacare.

Wait a minute. Didn’t the Supreme Court already uphold Obamacare in 2012? Yes, it did. So why is the constitutionality of this legislation back before the Supreme Court?

Here is the backstory.

The ACA of 2010 marked the complete federal takeover of regulating health care delivery in America. It eliminated personal choices and mandated rules and regulations on almost all aspects of health care and health care insurance. It created a complex structure that, at the back end, directed the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars on health care and, at the front end, received health insurance premiums from or on behalf of every adult in America.

To assure that every adult obtained and paid for health care coverage, the ACA authorized the IRS to assess those who failed to have health insurance about $8,800 a year and use that money to purchase a bare-bones insurance policy for them.

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Trump Did Not Flinch!, by Israel Shamir

Posted on September 29, 2020 | 2 comments

Israel Shamir celebrates Trump and his nominee for the Supreme Court. From Shamir at unz.com:

Trump didn’t flinch. He chose the good-looking Amy Barrett to replace the departed witch in the Supreme Court. What a difference! A devout Catholic instead of an atheist Jew; a flourishing wife and mother of seven instead of a bossy harridan keen on same-sex marriages and abortions; summer instead of winter. He made this choice even as liberal-feminist America was still bewailing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sobbing loudly. Her funeral was impressive, nay, unprecedented. In my native Russia, only Stalin was seen off with such pomp. RBG was as ugly as her deeds (beauty and ugliness count, as Oscar Wilde explained); probably nobody in history exceeded her contribution to destroy the family, to profane marriage, to slaughter children. She took feminism to its radical extreme: after her recent visit to Israel (she didn’t like the country) she said that Israeli women are discriminated like blacks under Jim Crow laws. She felt sorry for Israeli judges who are pensioned off at 70, instead of serving for life, till 87 in her case.

Perhaps RBG was the secret Mama of Washington, the answer to the Papa of Rome, the hidden ruler of the US Empire in some Judeo-Masonic hierarchy, the top reptilian, the head of the Deep State, while the President is just a figurehead. For many years she strenuously clung to life and power, enjoying torrents of infant blood baths. She wanted to survive the Trump presidency, to see the last of him, of that he-man; to pass the power to the next reptilian, formally a Biden appointee, but God stopped her and gave mankind a chance. With RBG in SCOTUS, Trump would not have had a snowflake’s chance in hell to win the election. Every judicial decision would have run against him. He would have been declared an illegal occupier of the White House long before the votes were counted. Now he has a chance.

RBG’s entourage called Trump out: “Don’t you dare appoint a new Supreme Court judge in her stead! A new judge will be appointed by the new president, Mr Biden!” This was the first challenge of Trump. The magrepha of mainstream media, this piercing screaming machine (so powerful that a person in Jerusalem could not hear his neighbour speaking on account of the sound of the magrepha, says the Talmud) was turned up to full volume, shouting “Don’t you dare!” and “It is illegal to appoint a judge in an election year!”. This is the mantra of the Transition Integrity Project: “Trump will lose the election and he will fight to retain his power, but eventually he will surrender and establish his own TV channel, MAGA TV”. The aim of this media campaign is to break down Trump’s will to resist and demoralize his supporters.

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Boston University Professor Denounces Barrett As “White Colonizer” For Adopting Two Haitian Children

Posted on September 28, 2020 | 4 comments

Leftist professors hit new lows almost every day. Here’s another one. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

WhiteHouse.gov (Twitter)

It appears that Judge Amy Coney Barrett has gone from a “cult member” for being a devout Catholic to a possible “white colonizer” for adopting two Haitian children.  Where most of us saw a loving interracial family at the White House ceremony on Saturday,  Ibram X. Kendi, the new director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, saw a possible case of effective baby snatching by “White colonizers.”

On Saturday, Kendi wrote “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”  The obvious implication is that the Barrett’s may have used their adopted children as mere props as part of a possible effort to hide their racism. It was clearly designed to curtail the praise of the Barrett family by suggesting that the parents might be racists. Indeed, he puts “adopted” in quotation marks to suggest that some of these children are not really adopted but presumably acquired or snatched by “White people.”

After leveling that truly disgusting suggestion against this family, Kendi added “And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.”

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