A curious mark of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett is the willingness of Democrats and liberals in the media to actually dumb themselves down in order to say something that sounds like criticism. In reality, it’s obvious that it’s just noise for the sake of making it.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have said over and over this week how affronted they are that Barrett, who will certainly be confirmed by Republicans alone, has declined to render rulings and decisions about cases and possible issues before she even takes her seat. Among those issues were scenarios related to the election.
The Washington Post on Wednesday said in an editorial that “this week’s hearings have arguably shed even less light than usual. By pushing through Judge Barrett in the middle of a red-hot presidential race, Republicans have made it more fraught for her to answer simple election-law-related questions, which would be easier to discuss at practically any other time.”
To call the questions “simple,” for no other reason than that the Post and other Democrats think that their answers are obvious, is either a stunning display of ignorance about how rulings work or is, again, a matter of pretending to make a point knowing it’s not a good one.
I’m going to assume it’s the latter.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, this week asked Barrett if the president could on his own change the date of the election and whether it was “illegal” for a contractor to dispatch poll watchers, which Klobuchar called “clear voter intimidation.”
On both questions Barrett said she couldn’t render an opinion on a hypothetical situation and that as a Supreme Court justice, she would first have to evaluate the circumstances and hear arguments from the relevant parties.
That’s how every case works. Yes, “voter intimidation” is illegal, but that’s not what Klobuchar was asking. She was asking about a real-world scenario, which then transforms the question to, “Is this an example of voter intimidation?” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is considered as such under some states’ laws but not others. That’s an argument that hasn’t been settled, and it can’t be settled by having Barrett pull an answer out of the air.
The same is true as to whether the president can unilaterally move the election. If he believes he has the authority, he would have to make the case. What’s the statute that gives him such power? His counsel would have to explain it to a panel of judges, who would then decide if his argument has any merit.
It’s not up to Barrett to decide hypothetical cases on the fly — in fact, such conduct could be considered a violation of judicial ethics. But that hardly matters anyway. Democrats were never going to vote to confirm her. We knew that without all of the willfully ignorant questions.
