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2020-10-10 e
Let Us Praise Excellence

The brilliance lives loudly within her

When Amy Coney Barrett came before that microphone in the Rose Garden to make her official introduction to the wider public, you knew you were getting a different sort of Supreme Court nominee. This wasn’t polished civics instructor Neil Gorsuch or earnest political operator Brett Kavanaugh. Here was a joyous, American-as-apple-pie judge next door.

“ I love the United States, and I love the United States Constitution,” she said on that Saturday afternoon at the White House. “I am truly humbled by the prospect of serving on the Supreme Court.” What a breath of fresh air amid the 2020 miasma, disarming critics and even dispelling some of the toxic clouds over Washington.

Barrett’s resume is impressive: Latin honors in college and law school, a Supreme Court clerkship, a distinguished professorial career with prolific scholarship. Yet the unassuming nature of this Notre Dame professor-turned-7th Circuit judge sets her apart from the Ivy-festooned club she’s set to join. As the mother of seven, including two adopted from Haiti, she would become the first female justice with school-age children. “The president has asked me to become the ninth justice, and, as it happens, I am used to being in a group of nine — my family,” Barrett quipped, in a twist on Kavanaugh’s “team of nine” moniker.

Indeed, how she and her husband Jesse, also a successful lawyer, juggle it all is as remarkable as Barrett’s accomplishments. The shot of their gaggle getting into a minivan to fly to Washington, with the nominee driving, was the icing on the cake. While some loft-dwelling coastal elites may have turned up their noses at the large family and its bourgeois habits, my wife and I looked at our comfortable but harried suburban existence and marveled at how this couple made both personal and professional achievement look so effortless.

But the Barretts might have stayed in their college-town idyll were it not for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As one of Donald Trump’s earliest circuit court nominees, Amy Coney Barrett faced a barrage of bigoted attacks on her religiosity. “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” Dick Durbin queried, as if praying the rosary were a disqualifier. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” added Dianne Feinstein, in what sounds like a rejected line from Star Wars.

“My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge,” Barrett responded to this line of questioning, as anyone could’ve expected. But the fact that she faced that kind of attack angered conservative elites and mainstream voters alike. By the time she was confirmed in October 2017, she had become a martyr, for lack of a better term, and the odds-on favorite for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat if it became available while Trump occupied the White House. “I’m saving her for Ginsburg,” the president said less than a year later after picking Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy. (read more)

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