He outmaneuvered Chuck Schumer last year, making the path clearer for this year’s high court nominee.
Mr. McConnell adopted as his top priority as Senate majority leader an ambitious effort to make the federal courts more conservative—from top to bottom. There’s only one way to do this—fill every judicial vacancy with a conservative.
For Mr. McConnell, this is a war. Justice Gorsuch was D-Day. Judge Brett Kavanaugh is the slog across France. Mr. McConnell is a general in a hurry to keep winning, since Republicans could lose the Senate majority in November.
.. When Justice Gorsuch sailed through, Democrats and the left were reeling from Donald Trump’s election. Their opposition was inept. The vaunted “resistance” to anything associated with Mr. Trump was pathetic. Now Democrats are committed to blocking Judge Kavanaugh, and they’re serious. But they still have Chuck Schumer as their leader, and they still can’t do it without Republican help.
.. Mr. McConnell is experienced in outmaneuvering Mr. Schumer. By the time the Democrat offered his deal, Mr. McConnell had recruited former Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire as Judge Gorsuch’s sherpa as he visited senators. Ms. Ayotte pointed Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski to Judge Gorsuch’s record, which didn’t reveal a yearning to kill Roe. After listening to Judge Gorsuch, the two senators were leaning in his favor. Mr. Schumer was too late.
.. Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski are back. Same issue. Democrats seem to think every GOP judicial nominee is hiding a passion for overturning Roe. In truth, some may be. But it’s awfully hard to prove it.
.. Why is Mr. McConnell so successful in getting Republican judges confirmed? He’s a big-picture guy. He plays a long game. He must have a home-state agenda for Kentucky, but you rarely hear of it. He’s not out for himself.
.. As Republican leader, he has little interest in popularity. He’s secretive and a self-described introvert. “He never tells me anything,” a close Senate ally says.
.. “In a city where concealing ambition behind a cloak of righteousness is the norm, this refusal is one of his more underappreciated virtues,” Mr. McGuire wrote. The majority leader’s willingness to oppose popular issues like the tobacco settlement and campaign-finance reform show he’s no political weakling.
.. Among Mr. McConnell’s unusual traits are patience and a sense of when to call a vote. He’s willing to delay a vote for months waiting for precisely the right moment. Last spring he twice canceled votes to confirm an appeals court nominee. When he felt the time had come, he held a quick vote. The judge was confirmed handily... No one is better at the game, now or probably ever.
‘Don’t You Dare Touch Roe!’ — Judicial Confirmation Silly Season Begins
Roe probably won’t be overturned because it probably won’t come up; Casey is the center of abortion law nowadays.
.. the cesspool that judicial-confirmation politics has become since his name became a synonym for slander in 1987 — a debacle that changed history for the worse in more ways than the woodenly whimsical Anthony Kennedy’s assumption of what should have been the Bork seat.
.. Thanks to Justice Kennedy, we’ve actually been living in a Casey world — as in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — for the past quarter century. For good and for ill.
.. It is a sign of our wayward times that a “conservative” judge is one committed to construing the law as it is written, in accordance with what it was commonly understood to mean when adopted. You might think that’s simply what a judge is. But progressives rely on robed legislators to block the elected officials who beat them at the polls, and to impose on the nation what they cannot enact democratically. These are known as judges with “empathy.”
Collins wants you to know: She’s not one of those staid old Republicans looking for a staid old by-the-book jurist. She wants empathy!
.. Rhetorically at least, this 1973 ruling’s fabrication of a constitutional right to abort unborn children retains for progressives its sacral status. But in point of fact, the Supreme Court itself has dismantled much of Roe’s framework. What survives is its narrowing core.
.. Democrats eliciting verbal acrobatics from solid nominees who are well aware both that Roe is atrociously reasoned and that saying so will imperil their confirmation chances.
.. If abortion ever gets rolled back in this country, it will be because a cultural shift forces legal change, not the other way around.
.. Casey was a triple gut punch for conservatives.
- First, in a bitterly divided 5–4 ruling, the Court upheld the constitutional abortion right it purported to discover in Roe.
- Second, the main opinion, among the most farcical in the Court’s history, was jointly crafted by Reagan appointees Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor, along with Bush 41 pick David Souter.
- Third, while paring Roe back in significant ways, the trio reaffirmed a potentially limitless “substantive due process” right to “liberty” in any matter as to which five unelected lawyers decide dignity and privacy warrant it.
.. the ruling’s demolition of Roe’s capricious trimester construct.. Casey’s reaffirmation of Roe is highly qualified. It made clear that the state is free to adhere to a strongly pro-life policy even before “fetal viability.”.. And viability is a dynamic concept, so as evolving technology made it possible to preserve and protect unborn life at earlier stages, states would have commensurate power to restrict or even outlaw abortion throughout more of pregnancy... the national abortion debate should never have been moved to the federal courthouse for resolution, and pro-lifers cannot win it there in any event. It has to be won in the culture, from the ground up... It has since moved on to gay rights (including same-sex marriage, endorsed in Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell opinion in 2015), and now we are on to LGBTQ rights, three-partner marriage (and why stop at three?), and who knows what other transgressive erosions of bourgeois culture... What we need from judges is to remember that our law is a reflection of who we are, not a tool to shape us into something else. What we need from confirmation hearings is to ensure that we get judges of that kind.
Amy Barrett for the Supreme Court
her membership in an organization called People of Praise. This body, which is not affiliated with the Church or any Protestant denomination, is devoted to so-called “charismatic” spirituality: guitar hymns and a somewhat gushy attitude towards prayer. Nothing could be further removed from the high-and-dry devotional lives of actual traditionalist Catholics, whose responses to the charismatic movement since its inception have tended to range from “Not my cup of tea, thanks!” to accusations of heresy.
.. I fully expect that sooner or later a court of which Barrett were a member would overturn Roe v. Wade. That a woman should be responsible for undoing this legally sanctioned perversion of the most wholesome relationship in nature, that between a mother and her child, seems to me right in a way that is almost ineffable.
.. she asked the absolute sharpest, most penetrating questions. She is scary smart.”
.. Barrett should be nominated by the president and confirmed for the very simple reason that she is a gifted legal mind respected by her colleagues and a person of outstanding character whose presence on our country’s highest court would do credit to the United States and her people.
Kennedy’s Replacement Should Be Judge Amy Coney Barrett
It will be nice to have one woman in the majority when the Supreme Court finally overturns Roe v. Wade.
.. She is the youngest of the five top choices, which is a mark in her favor given that the nominee will have life tenure and Trump will want one who will leave a lasting mark on the law.
.. Her educational history — she went to Rhodes College and Notre Dame Law School — would add a little welcome diversity to a Supreme Court full of Yale and Harvard alumni... Barrett has also recently been through Senate confirmation to a federal appeals court. She won the support of all the Republicans and three Democrats.. But they will be hard-pressed to argue that she is an extremist given their own recent support... “Dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said, in reference to Barrett’s Catholic faith. Never mind that Barrett had already said that “it is never appropriate for a judge to apply their personal convictions, whether it derives from faith or personal conviction.”.. Feinstein’s office defended the senator by noting that Barrett had also written, in an article for the Notre Dame Alumni Association, that all people play a role “in God’s ever-unfolding plan to redeem the world” — which is a fairly basic statement of Christian belief that does not imply support for the judicial imposition of theocracy.
.. opposing a woman will probably be more awkward for senators than opposing a man would be. Also, it cannot be good for conservatism that all three women now on the court are liberals.
.. If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned — as I certainly hope it will be, as it is an unjust decision with no plausible basis in the Constitution — it would be better if it were not done by only male justices, with every female justice in dissent.
So pick Barrett, Mr. President. Let the dogma live loudly on the Supreme Court.