The news business has various ways of hooking readers. One is to write a sensational headline on a story that, once you’ve opened it, turns out to be a dud. That’s clickbait, which has always struck me as self-defeating because disappointing readers is likely to prove an unsuccessful long-term business model. If you over-egg the souffle, it will fall flat when you open the oven, and your hungry customer will walk away in disgust, never to return.
Another common trick is to make an issue seem finely balanced, on a knife’s edge, when in fact the outcome is clear. In this ruse, a foregone conclusion is presented as a cliffhanger to keep readers excited. A classic case was revealed for me after the first Gulf War in a blistering attack by the great war historian, John Keegan, who excoriated news outlets for stoking anxiety about the outcome even though a correlation of forces made it clear President George H.W. Bush’s coalition would swiftly crush Saddam Hussein’s military.
There is interesting cliffhangerism today over the question of whether Amy Coney Barrett, once confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court, will recuse herself from cases that might decide the election outcome. The foregone conclusion is that she won’t because she shouldn’t, but that isn’t how Democrats and their left-liberal media allies want it played. The Washington Post duly secured equivocal comment recently from experts willing to furrow their brows over this not-so-knotty question. Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, for example, was reported as “leaning on the side of Barrett not having to recuse, but…” — it’s a big but — “…it’s a much different and more difficult call largely because of the sorts of comments that the president made.”
It’s true that one of President Trump’s proffered reasons for confirming Barrett swiftly against Democrats’ wishes is that the nation’s highest tribunal should not remain split 4-4 and thus potentially be incapable of making a decision, as it was obliged to do on the Florida recount in 2000. Trump has unwisely set Barrett up as the deciding vote, to which one can respond only that it was characteristically clumsy and unhelpful of him to do so, but also that it makes not a jot of difference to the probity of her participating in decisions that might lead to his victory or defeat.
The entire question of recusal has been stirred up by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee because it is a political win-win for them to do so. Either they get the big win of Barrett recusing herself, which is a vanishingly remote possibility, in which case the ideological balance will be temporarily shifted leftward, and the court itself might be rendered impotent. Or Barrett declines to recuse herself, in which case Democrats get the consolation prize of being able to trash her as Trump’s glove puppet, further eroding judicial authority, if she sides with the majority in a decision that helps the incumbent.
Barrett told the Judiciary Committee that she would not “allow [herself] to be used as a pawn to decide this election.” Her untarnished record as an appellate judge makes plain that she will resist political pressure and will decide impartially what the Constitution requires of her. This means she won’t let the fact that Trump nominated her or that she is a conservative tip her in favor of the incumbent. But it also means she won’t buckle under pressure from the Left when it demands she remove herself from the picture.
The case for recusal rests solely on the hope of helping Joe Biden. It is purely political. And it would contradict Barrett’s record, and her every utterance on the subject if she were to rule for political reasons. The core and pure jurisprudential stance that made her a favorite nominee, recommended by the Federalist Society, will direct her unequivocally to avoid taking what would be a quintessentially political step.
The cynicism with which her foregone decision to participate properly as a full member of the highest bench has been portrayed as a mystery is breathtaking only if you’ve been asleep for the past four years. A disingenuous perplexity over minutiae coupled with a refusal to see the obvious is perhaps the most abiding characteristic of press coverage of the Trump administration. It accounts for the pretzel gymnastics of those who kept insisting on the truth of long-debunked allegations that he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Clarity is not their friend. And if there is one thing above all else that Amy Coney Barrett has given us, it is clarity.
