When Republicans inevitably announced they were going to ram through Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation before the November election, after they blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination because of the made-up “election-year” rule, it wasn’t just because they’re colossal hypocrites. Oh sure, they are, but the actual reason they’re doing so is because in Barrett they have found a judge who they can reliably expect will, given the opportunity, help overturn Roe v. Wade, ax the Affordable Care Act, gut voting rights, protect guns, scrap same-sex marriage, and potentially deliver Donald Trump a second term. They know this because in her work as a judge and law professor, she has made her positions abundantly clear. Really, it’s not a secret! It’s all right there with her name on it! Yet even though Barrett’s confirmation is in the bag, on Tuesday, she felt the need to pretend she might not actually strip health care for millions of Americans or reverse the landmark abortion decision or do a solid for Trump should the 2020 election be litigated in court, as the president has said it should be. Whether this was to give Republicans cover or because she knows a clip of her saying, for example, “Why yes, I look forward to forcing women into back-alley abortions” wouldn’t be a great look, Barrett went to absurd lengths to act like her opinions aren’t already widely known.
At numerous times over the course of the hearing, Barrett dodged questions about abortion rights, claiming that she couldn’t say if she believed various rulings like Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey were rightly or wrongly decided. “On something that is really a major cause with major effect on over half of the population of this country…it’s distressing not to get a straight answer,“ Senator Dianne Feinstein said, after Barrett initially refused to give a straight answer. “So let me try again. Do you agree with Justice Scalia’s view that Roe was wrongly decided?” Responding that she “completely” understood why Feinstein was asking, Barrett said she couldn‘t “precommit or say yes I’m going in with some agenda because I’m not. I don’t have any agenda.” Only, as many have pointed out, she actually does have agenda. For instance, in 2006, she signed a letter that said “The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion for any reason. It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” The letter came from an organization called the St. Joseph County Right to Life, a group that, according to The Guardian, also believes that the “discarding of unused or frozen embryos created in the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process ought to be criminalized.” In what must have been a completely innocent oversight, Barrett didn’t include the letter on the extensive questionnaire nominees are required to fill out. Strangely, she also forgot to mention a similar letter signed along with her colleagues in the Notre Dame Faculty for Life group and was rather testy about being pressed on the matter:
Later, Senator Amy Klobuchar tried a different tack, noting that Barrett said she views Brown v. Board of Education as a “super-precedent,” i.e. something that is so widely accepted that no one questions it anymore, but claimed that Roe, a landmark case, does not fall into the same category and could be overturned. “Richard Fallon from Harvard said, Roe is not a super-precedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased,” Barrett said, effectively acknowledging, without saying outright, that she’d nix abortion rights the first chance she got. (Note: While there may be more calls from the religious right to overturn abortion than there are to resegregate schools, a majority of the country supports a woman’s right to choose.) Barrett’s claim that Roe is supposedly not a super-precedent is important because in 2013, she wrote that a judge should enforce her “best understanding of the Constitution,” rather than whatever precedent is supposedly “in conflict with it.” And speaking of the Constitution, it appears that Barrett, unsurprisingly, doesn’t believe the document protects a woman’s right to decide what to do with her body.
As a note, Senator Richard Blumenthal’s question came in regard to a story he told about a constituent named Samantha whose rapist impregnated her, and who said, “I knew if I couldn’t end this pregnancy, it would end me.” And even then Barrett wouldn’t say if Roe was correctly decided.
Asked about the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans are currently trying to destroy in court, and which Barrett would have an opportunity to rule on, the judge similarly claimed she couldn’t possibly offer any sort of opinion when, in reality, her opinion is clear. Per Slate: