Pierce:Sheldon Whitehouse Made the Case That Amy Coney Barrett's Nomination Is a Bag Job [View all]

[mcar]

Sheldon Whitehouse Made the Case That Amy Coney Barrett's Nomination Is a Bag Job
It was planned and executed by a vast and single-minded network of which no parallel exists on the other side.

By Charles P. Pierce
Oct 13, 2020

The general feeling that the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is the capstone of a lavishly funded, long-term conservative plan to own the federal judiciary for the foreseeable future, and that Barrett's career is altogether a product of that project, has hung over the confirmation hearings like a foul mist. On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave that feeling form and substance, and charts, too.

Whitehouse used every one of his allotted 30 minutes to describe in detail the mechanisms by which conservative activists, fueled by the unlimited corporate money unleashed by Citizens United v. FEC, have fashioned to produce judicial nominees—and, ultimately, judges—on what in the last decade has looked very much like an ideological assembly line. Whitehouse showed in (occasionally excruciating) detail every aspect of the complicated network at the center of which is the Federalist Society, the intellectual wingnut-welfare chop-shop to which this president* outsourced the selection of federal judges.

He then tied all that research into the current full-court press across the federal courts to kill the Affordable Care Act, curb reproductive freedom, and reverse marriage equality, to say nothing of the dozens of cases regarding the money power and corporate control of government that are the real goals of most of the people funding what Whitehouse called, "the schemes." Whitehouse even worked in his favorite statistic—that on those kind of cases, there have been 80 decisions handed down by the current court as 5-4 decision, and the business/conservative side of those cases, which almost always coincides with the interests of Republican donors, is 80-0.
...

The Republicans went predictably into orbit. Ted Cruz tried to throw some statistics back at Whitehouse and Young Ben Sasse snidely referred to Whitehouse's visual aids as "Beautiful Mind charts," referring to the scribblings of schizophrenic math genius John Nash, because Young Ben Sasse rarely misses an opportunity to be an insufferable nuisance. But they couldn't refute the case that Whitehouse had made so relentlessly: that this nomination is a bag job being hustled through to please a half-mad president* who may be howling down the hallways of the White House by now. And that it was planned and executed by a vast and single-minded network of which no parallel exists on the other side.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34362944/sheldon-whitehouse-federalist-society-amy-coney-barrett/