An exceptional candidate
Congratulations to our newest Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett.
She's not the first Justice to serve alongside a Justice for whom she had clerked--that was Gorsuch, who clerked for Kennedy--but she's the first one to have been sworn in by that Justice (in this case, Clarence Thomas).
I'm not convinced Justice Barrett is a conservative in the usual sense of the word. I think she's a textualist, which will lead her to many results embraced by conservatives and some that will drive conservatives crazy. Her decisions may also remind us that some changes are supposed to be brought about by legislation and, if necessary, by constitutional amendments, rather than by judges.
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3 comments:
She is the first Justice to be someone I actually wanted to be a Justice before she was nominated. She's the one I'd hoped would get the last two slots. Hopefully she'll be a good one; if not, I'll have learned that what I thought made a good Justice didn't. But maybe it does. How nice to have a chance to find out.
She is important chess piece. Even more than Trump in some ways.
The Vampiric cabal must really have lost their C4 to have let her go through. Distracted by all these info ops, Q, Trump, impeachment, Corona, Hunter.
I think she's a textualist....
She's also an originalist; she says she's both, and there's no reason to doubt her (nor am I suggesting that you do). During the extended civics lesson she provided for the likes of Progressive-Democrats Hirono and the Hero of Vietnam, she gave the clearest definition of those terms I'd heard in a long time. An originalist takes the text of the Constitution for what it says and what it said and meant when it was written--all of its parts and Amendments. (And I assert that meanings from editions of Johnson's Dictionaryand Sheridan's Dictionary that were contemporaneous with the writing haven't changed much at all since then.) Textualism she says, is originalism applied to the statutes that get enacted.
This will, of course, produce rulings uncomfortable for Conservatives as well as for liberals, especially given the respect for precedent an originalist/textualist judge or Justice must have. Nevertheless, the first and prior precedent, the precedent that governs above all else—including the foolishness of the "super-precedents" to which even Barrett succumbs—is our Constitution.
I'm not worried about the future totality of her opinions and dissents. Besides, if we're not made uncomfortable on occasion, we're getting too fat and sassy.
Eric Hines
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