Amy Coney Barrett graduated first in her class at the University of Notre Dame’s law school, earning herself a rare, one-way shortcut from the non-Ivy elite to clerk for Antonin Scalia. She became one of the most respected legal scholars alive and earned a Supreme Court nomination, all before turning 50.
In any sane world, Barrett would be judged on her merit and jurisprudence alone. In the saner corners of the legal elite, she is. Noah Feldman, the star liberal law professor touted out by Democrats to argue in favor of President Trump’s impeachment, spoke for the cooler heads in the Barrett debate, calling the judge on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals “a brilliant lawyer” and “a genuine and good person” who “deserves to be on the Supreme Court.”
And yet, Barrett’s confirmation process has been fraught with identity politics from the start. If the Republican performance of the first day of her confirmation hearings, the conservative legal movement is happy to beat the Left at its own game, avoiding a Kavanaugh-style catastrophe and avenging Chuck Schumer’s assault on Miguel Estrada.
Barrett is the proud mother of five biological children, the youngest of whom has Down Syndrome, in addition to two adopted children from Haiti. In a vacuum, this should be as unremarkable as the late Antonin Scalia’s brood of nine children or John McCain’s same pack of seven. But the Left has overplayed its hand, and we now clearly know what happens when any single point against a conservative judicial nominee’s privilege is left unaddressed. Now, Senate Minority Leader Schumer led the crusade against the confirmation of Estrada specifically based on his Hispanic heritage, according to emails leaked at the time. They had to destroy the man nominated by George W. Bush to join the D.C. Circuit Court, based solely on the fact that the Honduran immigrant could prove a highly capable Supreme Court nominee.
As the Democrats worked to ruin Estrada’s life and reputation, he lost his unborn child to a stress-induced miscarriage and then his wife to an accidentally lethal combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. Still, Republicans continued to play nice, refusing to nuke the judicial filibuster. It would be Harry Reid who finally pulled that trigger and paved the way for Trump to remake the federal judiciary, more than three decades after Joe Biden destroyed Robert Bork’s SCOTUS bid. Even then, Republicans allowed the party parading the former vice president as their champion to conduct a show trial accusing Brett Kavanaugh of serial gang rapes without a shred of evidence.
Now, Estrada will have his revenge. Bork will have his revenge. Kavanaugh will have his revenge. And most incredibly, they’ll get it all not because Republicans circumvent any constitutional or historical precedent, but because Republicans are finally beating Democrats using their own rules.
Republicans have mounted an admirably shameless, proactive strategy to undercut any potential character assassination desperate Democrats may try this time. Consider: How do you convince pussy-hatted wine moms that Barrett is secretly some sexually subservient handmaid when she and half of the Senate Judiciary Committee boast about all seven of her children? How do you make the case that Barrett is a secret Manchurian candidate for Catholicism when she proudly and repeatedly brags about her Catholic faith and the entire Republican Party follows suit? With Barrett, the GOP is leaving no stone unturned.
Republicans had popular prep school grad Brett Kavanaugh initially play nice and humble. Democrats responded by smearing him as a violent felon. But the Left cannot credibly smear a career woman who is as accomplished as Barrett as a perennially pregnant sex slave or a religious extremist if she and every Republican in elected office are boasting specifically about her progeny and her Catholic faith as affirmative selling points in her favor.
The last Supreme Court nominee whom Notre Dame professor Patricia O’Hara recommended for confirmation prior to Barrett was Elena Kagan, the brilliant Harvard Law School dean who came to the court with even less experience as a judge than Barrett. When Kagan came to the bench with no children or husband (but a plum endorsement from her former classmate Estrada), she saw a similar tone of hand-wringing over her child-free status, though less aggressively adversarial in tenor.
A decade later and the Gen X #GirlBoss is dead at the hands of misanthropic millennials, and the politics have reversed to a Malthusian level of petrification at the notion of a woman who really did manage to have it all. Like Estrada, Barrett was slated to receive the double whammy of a punishment reserved for a lifetime appointee who is both from a less privileged demographic and a Republican appointee, but for better or for worse, Barrett is armed with an entire party finally happy to fight.
