I see the GOP is successfully manipulating the narrative once again, drawing in even Trump opponents their web of falsehood that paints the Supreme Court pick as a “religious” issue instead of what it is: the installation of a rightwing hack who, having already helped kill one election, will spend decades entrenching the power of rapacious elites.
The objection to Amy Barrett is not that she’s a Catholic. This a fake-news trope being drummed up by Trumpists. Joe Biden is a Catholic. There is a Catholic on the Supreme Court appointed by Democrats. The objection is to the legal positions she’s advanced during her brief career on the bench, which almost uniformly chip away and strip away the rights of free citizens in favor of Big Money and government power. The other objection is that she, like Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, was part of the legal team that worked successfully to overthrow the will of the American people in the 2000 election by stopping the re-count in Florida, which would have given Al Gore the electoral college majority along with the majority of votes from actual voters that he won.
Working first with state officials in Florida — that is, with governor of the state, George Bush’s brother Jeb, and the official directly in charge of elections, Kathleen Harris, who also happened to be the chairman of Bush’s Florida campaign operation — the Roberts-Kavanaugh-Barrett cabal stopped the recount (with the help of a riot staged by GOP staffers who physically invaded public offices and threatened recounters.) This deeply corrupt usurpation of the democratic process was then upheld by a Supreme Court with two justices who had close family members (son, wife) working directly with the Bush campaign.
Now Barrett, having already taken part in the illicit overturning of one election, is being bullrushed onto the Court so she can rule on another election which Republicans are already openly admitting they will contest, no matter how badly they’re defeated at the polls or in the electoral college.
None of this is about religion, or family values or any other hot-button “cultural warfare trope the rightwing hokes up. It’s about power: specifically, the power of the elite to hold unaccountable, unregulated sway over American society and its citizens. Barrett, a willing executioner of American democracy in 2000, is being appointed by a man who was not chosen by the majority of voters in 2016 and openly says he will not respect the voters’ wishes in 2020 if they vote against him; and she will be confirmed by a Senate “majority” that represents 15 million fewer Americans than the “minority” opposition.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: whatever you want to call the system of power in the United States today, it is not a representative democracy in any sense of the word.
(PS. And if you still think the Democrats will fight any overthrow of the election result by the Republican Party and the GOP-dominated Supreme Court in 2020, see the above reference to the 2000 election. They didn’t fight for democracy then and they won’t do it now. This is not a pleasant truth, but it is the truth, and we’d better get ready for it.)