https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/amy-coney-barrett-hit-a-home-runAmy Coney Barrett hit a home run
by Washington Examiner, October 17, 2020
In three days before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett did more than just prove that she belongs on the Supreme Court. She delivered one of the most effective performances ever for a nominee seeking the job.
As judicial nominations have become more contentious, all recent nominees to the Supreme Court have demonstrated a depth of knowledge about constitutional law and a lawyer’s ability to field questions from senators. Barrett certainly did all of that. In days of testimony, she effortlessly recounted the issues at stake in various legal disputes, juggled questions from senators, and explained the reasoning in her own decisions and academic writings, all without notes.
Importantly, Barrett did so without pretense. Because of her serious-mindedness and years as a teacher, she was able to explain her views with crystal clarity, simplicity, and a conversational tone that was both engaging and impregnable. She managed to distill complex legal concepts into extremely lucid language rather than hiding behind legal jargon or Latin phrases. She was friendly and civil even when forcefully pushing back against questions that attempted to portray her as a tool of President Trump, a racist, or a denier of science.
Barrett described the late Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked, as her mentor and said she shared his judicial philosophy. But she also made it plain that this didn’t mean she would always reach the same conclusions as he did.
She succinctly summarized his philosophy as: “A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were.”
Asked to give a plain-English description of the originalist approach that she shares with Scalia, she explained, “[It] means that I interpret the Constitution as a law, that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time. And it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
Two originalists using the same approach could end up reaching different outcomes if their interpretation of what the document meant at the time was different.
Democrats became frustrated by Barrett’s refusal to describe her legal views on issues that may come before the court. But she followed the practice of modern nominees, invoking the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s line that she would give “no hints, no previews, no forecasts.”
For much of the time, however, Democrats tried to pin Barrett down on policy issues, giving long speeches about Obamacare, which they said she was put on the court to overturn. They cited her writings as an academic, in which she critiqued past decisions by Chief Justice John Roberts upholding Obamacare. She patiently explained why prior Obamacare cases were different than the one now before the court.
Sen. Kamala Harris played a game of gotcha by asking Barrett a series of uncontroversial questions, such as whether the coronavirus is infectious or whether smoking causes lung cancer, and then asking whether she believed climate change was a threat to the environment.
But Barrett exposed Harris’s superficiality. “You have asked me a series of questions that are completely uncontroversial,” Barrett explained, “trying to analogize that to elicit an opinion from me that is on a very contentious matter of public debate, and I will not do that. I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial.”
As Democrats kept trying to press her on these and other policy positions, Barrett rightly deflected them by saying that it is up to Congress, not judges, to debate policy and write laws.
“I can’t impose the law of Amy,” she stated plainly.
Barrett’s impressive performance should leave no room for doubt about her readiness for the job.
