Below is my column in USA Today on the troubling course taken by Democratic members in the confirmation hearing of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. As I have stated, there are a host of legitimate questions to be raised over Judge Barrett’s view of the law. Indeed, I praised the exchanges between Sen. Dick Durbin (D., IL.) and Judge Barrett as the substantive highlight of the hearing. Unfortunately, those were the exceptions. Instead, the thrust of the entire hearing was that Barrett was unqualified due to her expected vote in the upcoming case on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Various senators directly stated that they would vote against Barrett to protect the ACA. That is what is so unnerving about the Barrett confirmation hearing.
Here is the column:
The confirmation hearing of Judge Amy Coney Barrett could easily have been mistaken for the sentencing hearing for John Wayne Gacy. Surrounding Barrett were huge pictures of sick individuals. One would think that Barrett was being confronted with the faces of her victims. In reality, the pictures perfectly captured a far more important message. Senators had finally broken free from any pretense of principle in reviewing the qualifications of a nominee. Indeed, many are about to create a new rule, the Barrett Rule, allowing conditional confirmation voting. The pictures were meant to pressure Barrett to either satisfy senators that she would vote against an Affordable Care Act challenge or they would vote against her confirmation.
There has long been a debate over the legitimate grounds for opposing a Supreme Court nominee. While senators can vote under the Constitution for good, bad or no reason at all, most have sought to justify their votes on some principled basis. For most of our history, senators followed the rule that disagreement with a nominee’s jurisprudential views was not a basis to vote against their confirmation. A president was viewed as constitutionally entitled to appoint jurists reflecting their own legal viewpoint and the primary basis for voting against a nominee was on the lack of qualifications or some disqualifying personal or professional controversy. It was a rule of senatorial deference that controlled the majority of nominations in our history.
Voting against nominees based on their expected votes
Members began to chafe at the limitations of this principle in the second half of the twentieth century. With abortion, desegregation and other hot button issues, confirmations became politics by another means. With every year, senators became more open about voting against nominees solely on the basis for their expected votes. This trend was accelerated in October 1987 in the confirmation hearing of Judge Robert Bork presided over by a senator from Delaware named Joe Biden. Bork was labeled “outside of the mainstream” of legal thought and rejected in a process that is now called “Borking.”
Democratic members have struggled with changing rationales for voting against Barrett, who has impeccable credentials as an accomplished academic and respected jurist. One such implausible claim was made the day before the hearing by Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) on Fox News Sunday. He claimed the nomination “constitutes court packing.” Both Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Cal.) have referred to nominating conservatives as court packing. Biden and others have refused to tell voters whether they will move to pack the Supreme Court if the Democrats retake both the Senate and the White House (a proposal once denounced by Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself). Instead of answering, Coons and others insist that Barrett’s nomination is court packing — a position that would allow them to vote against her without the need to consider her actual qualifications.
The portrayal of the Barrett nomination as court packing is facially absurd. Court packing is the expansion of the Court to create a dominant ideological majority. Referring to such a proposal by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Sen. Joe Biden once denounced it as “a bonehead idea . . . a terrible, terrible mistake” in seeking to add seats to the Court just to create a majority. Filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court is not court packing under any remotely plausible definition. Otherwise, anytime you disagree with the choices of a president, it would be court packing despite leaving the court the same size.
With little traction on the packing pitch, Senators were left with a rare moment of clarity. Indeed, Sen. Cory Booker (D., NJ) captured it best when, without waiting to hear from Barrett, Booker announced that he would vote against her. The reason was that she might vote against the ACA. The clear suggestion is that, after an election, the Democrats hoped to nominate someone who would clearly support the ACA. The issue was simply her expected vote on Nov. 10 in the case of California v. Texas.
Barrett and the ACA
We have now reached the Rubicon of confirmation politics. Thirty-three years after the Bork hearing, senators are now stripping away any pretense or nuance: they will oppose Barrett because of her expected votes on cases. In particular, Democrats have been arguing that they will vote against Barrett to prevent her from voting on a pending case, California v. Texas, dealing with the constitutionality of the ACA. Sen. Mazie K. Hirono (D., HI) announced recently that she would vote against Barrett because “she will vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act.”
In reality, the ACA case is unlikely to be struck down. The Court may uphold the lower court in declaring the individual mandate of the original ACA to be unconstitutional, but the real issue is whether that provision can be “severed” from the rest of the statute. Most legal experts believe that the Court has a clear majority favoring severance and preserving the rest of the act. The law was originally saved by Chief Justice John Roberts who felt that the individual mandate was constitutional. Congress later nullified the mandate.
The question before the Court is whether the rest of the act can be “severed” from the now defunct mandate — a question that cuts across the Court’s ideological divisions. Indeed, conservatives like Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh are expected to uphold the rest of the law. Thus, despite the pictures in the hearing, the picture for the ACA looks solid even with a Justice Barrett on the Court. Indeed, no one knows how Barrett would vote on the issue of severability.
The more important decision in the hearing is that some Senators are now invoking the right to vote against a nominee on the basis of her expected vote on this pending case. It will be a uniquely ironic moment since it was Ginsburg who refused to answer questions on pending or expected cases as improper and unethical inquiries by the Senate. It became known as the “Ginsburg Rule.” We may now have the Barrett Rule where a nomination can be rejected without such assurances.
The Barrett Rule would allow not only for the packing of a Court but the packing of the Court with guaranteed ideological drones. It is court packing without any pretense. Like our current politics, it would finally strip away any nuance or nicety. The court, like Congress, would become subject to raw and brutal politics at its very worst.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @JonathanTurley
Looks like Twitter is banning more people on the right. Biden can’t win without the media and social media lying and cheating. I don’t think the cheating will work but we will know in the future.
Free press is dying. Thank goodness for the new alternative sources of news. The Shills are dependent on the those that lie so hopefully they will disappear as well.
” Trump was elected by the electoral college.”
Had the rule been the popular vote he probably would have won that as well.
Trump LOST the popular vote. Bush LOST the popular vote. The most-conservative members of the SCOTUS were appointed by Republicans who LOST the popular vote. Pardon the American people if they don’t support the SCOTUS and view it as a weapon used to defeat the will of the majority of Americans on things like the ACA, Roe v. Wade, gerrymandering to favor Republicans, tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-wealthy, privatization of government services, rollbacks of environmental and consumer protections…the list goes on. Republicans tried and failed 70 times to defeat the ACA by legislation, so they resort to the SCOTUS, where they have more control. That’s just one example. Fasten your seatbelts, America. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
The most-conservative members of the SCOTUS were appointed by Republicans who LOST the popular vote.
I must have slept through civics class where it was explained the popular vote elected presidents. IIRC, the popular vote elects members of the Senate which is the actual body that provides consent for those appointments. So if you have a beef with how an associate justice gets confirmed, then look no further than who the people elected in the Senate to confirm them.
“Trump LOST the popular vote.”
Natacha, when smart people run for President they run to win not get the most votes. Trump concentrated on getting additional votes by the thousands. A lot of time is needed for those populations. Had he required the popular vote he would have gone to populous areas like NYC. There he would be looking for hundreds of thousands of votes into the million figure. A lot of New Yorkers that are Republicans (I presume the same for California) don’t vote because they are in enough of a minority that their vote doesn’t count. 8 million people in NYC. 80% of the vote went for Hillary only 20% for Trump. That sounds much greater than the actual split. Just a 10% increased voter turnout for Trump would have been 800,000 votes in that densely packed area and it is my bet even more would have voted for Trump had Trump come to the city. He would have revived the love of some of the many things he did for free in NYC and maybe even some Democrats would change their votes.
Remember Giuliani won in NYC. That would mean ~30% more would have had to vote Republican. You make assumptions that are very likely wrong.
I should have added 30% of the vote equals 2.4Million votes and that is in one l small part of NY.
I should also add that the population at large is more conservative than the press and more conservative then where you think it is. If that is correct the Republicans might win a lot more frequently if the popular vote determined elections.
Allan: “Had the rule been the popular vote he probably would have won that as well.”
Yes! Quite likely. Trump campaigned to win the electoral college because that is what counted.
If the winner was based on the popular vote then Trump would have campaigned for the popular vote.
It is silly to say he would have lost on the popular vote when he wasn’t even trying to win the popular vote.
Was Hillary actually stupid enough to ignore the electoral college (which counts) and campaign for the popular voter (which doesn’t count)? I guess that gives her endless whining privileges, but it could never give her the electoral college.
Actually, I think they were convinced she would win because they pulled out all the stops to cheat. When you mark the cards and still lose at poker you are convinced there is something wrong with the whole universe.
Consistent with their tradition of embracing segregation the Democrats think it is a good idea again:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/university-of-kentucky-segregated-residential-assistance-training-by-race-sent-white-people-to-white-accountability-space
But white people better make no mistake that the coming Democrat version of segregation will be at their expense. & Expect “reparations” to pass if they get a blue wave.
Elections are the one time when Americans have to put on their thinking caps about “groups” and reckon their interests wisely
The scalp you save may be your own
Kurtz– I agree. I have gone tribal in my thinking.
Here he goes again. Turley says: “The portrayal of the Barrett nomination as court packing is facially absurd. Court packing is the expansion of the Court to create a dominant ideological majority.”
Here’s a little factoid for you, Turley: among the names of the lawyers contributing to the briefs in Gore v. Bush (another case in which the American people were cheated out of their choice for POTUS because the SCOTUS ordered the Florida recount to be stopped; Gore still won the popular vote) were: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and, you guessed it, Amy C. Barrett. Coincidence? Then, there’s Trump outright saying that 9 judges are needed for the election appeal he’s planning on filing. What further proof of “court-packing” do you need, Turley. But then, here’s another chance to take a shot at Biden and Harris that Turley just can’t pass up.
What is facially absurd is Turley’s endless defense of Trump and the Republicans trying to defeat the will of the American people..
The only thing I see, Natacha, is a concerted effort by you and your fellow travelers to redefine a term with the well-known and accepted meaning of “to add members to a judicial body with the expressed purpose of radically changing its judicial philosophy” to “nominating and confirming judges to open positions that we don’t like”. THAT is what is facially absurd, and hopefully American will be wise enough to see through the NewSpeak…
How ’bout we follow the McConnell Rule, which is no SCOTUS nomination or confirmation in a presidential election year? No, we can’t do that, because Republicans have to keep cheating and abusing the power they got via gerrymandering. Republicans refused to allow most of Obama’s federal district and appellate court vacancies to be filed, he denied Merrick Garland even a hearing, much less a vote, and has packed federal district and appellate courts with extreme conservatives, many of whom the ABA deemed “not qualified”, due to lack of experience.
How ’bout we follow common sense? Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and only “won” the Electoral College because his campaign fed sensitive insider polling information to Russian hackers on where to most effectively spread lies about Hillary Clinton on social media in key battleground states. Now, 4 years later, with Trump never even capturing a 50% approval rating in the interim, which is a record in the history of presidential polling, he stands to lose again, and has announced that the SCOTUS must have 9 judges (I refuse to use the word “justice” in conjunction with these persons’ names) for the election appeal he’s planning to file–to once again cheat the American people from having their choice as POTUS. So, is it a coincidence that if Barrett gets confirmed that there will be THREE judges on the SCOTUS who briefed the case of Gore v. Bush, which also denied the American people their choice of POTUS by stopping the Florida recount, so that an incorrect vote count could be “certified”, giving the election to Bush? No, it’s no coincidence, and this was engineered by the Federalist Society. Does this group represent the views of most Americans? Hell no.
These are FACTS, not rhetoric.
“Diaper Man, The N.Y. Post story is bogus! Why would Hunter Biden not pick up his lap top?? And why would the shop owner call Rudy Giuliani?? It only makes sense to stupid Trumpers.”
PaintChips, I see you are writhing in pain so what you said makes you feel better even if they are delusions due to pain killing opiates. Take note Joe Biden didn’t call the story a lie. That must have caused you to require an extra dose. You were so gullible when the Steele Dossier came out and of course the Golden Showers had to be true. Your fantasies aren’t bearing fruit so keep taking whatever you are on.
Diaper Man:
No one ever proved the golden showers episode didnt occur. Though in all fairness to Trump, I don’t think he requested it. The episode was a set-up in which the girls played to hidden cameras. They were coached into ‘showering’ as Trump approached climax.
Bill Clinton or JFK might have fallen prey to a similar type of set up. It’s the reason we want straight family men in the White House. Mitt Romney would know better than to let himself get in those situations.
No one ever proved the golden showers episode didnt occur.
Is that you Joe? We believe in truth over facts.
What is diabolical about the Left is they get away with forcing normal people to prove a negative, like “No one ever proved the golden showers episode didn’t occur.” They need to be called out on it every time…
PaintChips, we know all about your nail salon escapades and the crazy stuff you did. People still laugh silently about these episodes. I’m laughing now. Boy are they crazy. When people created the Golden Showers hoax I am sure you fantasized yourself in place of Trump. These things about you are crazy and true. No one ever proved they didn’t occur.
You’re talking to someone whose avocations include trolling the rest rooms at Will Rogers Park. The ‘golden showers’ episode’s going to sound a good deal more plausible to him than it would to an ordinary person.
I looked up the park to find a common phrase “lewd and lascivious”. SF right?
Jonathan Turley: This is becoming perfectly Orwellian. This is clearly major news. Indeed, if it is completely fabricated, it would also be a major story. However, these companies are actively preventing voters from fully reviewing and discussing the story. This should not be a partisan matter. This is plainly wrong and chilling conduct by these companies. They are again making the case against themselves for the loss of immunity.
https://twitter.com/JonathanTurley/status/1316765299899805698
If you think the actions by teitter and FB are going to benefit Biden, you are not thinking clearly.
Nothing seems to dent Biden’s observed support. Not sure what to make of that.
I’m guessing you also thought nothing was going to put a dent in Hillary’s support
They told us she was going to win in a landslide…
Much of the brouhaha about the ACA aka Obamacare is related to the regional dynamic between red and blue states, aka flyover versus coastal regions, that I have been exploring in my comments.
There is big money moving around and it is a tug of war over it. Economic impacts always matter profoundly
Kurtz– Think how much fun it will be if Trump loses, the Senate goes Democrat, and Sotomayor or Kagan steps down right after the election and Trump nominates another conservative before the end of his term.
Everything is going to hell. Might as well have a spectacular show. I imagine that in protest the Dems will loot and burn down Chicago or something before the vote confirming the appointment.
Sotomayor and Kagan aren’t going anywheres; retirements of Justices under 70 have grown odd; even the out-of-his-depth eunuch David Souter stayed on the Court until two months shy of his 70th birthday. The smart money says the two who might like to leave are Breyer (82 years old) and Thomas (72, the dean of the court right now, and a man with a life outside of politics and the law). Potter Stewart retired at 66 (nearly 40 years ago); he had grandchildren and hobbies; Sotomayor is a divorcee with no issue.
DSS, if you are thinking of longevity take note she is a juvenile diabetic, heavy and 66 years old. I am not looking toward her demise, in fact I find her to be a very nice and personable individual.
If this process confirms anything, it’s that the Democrats view a 5-4 conservative majority on the court as a generational roadblock to their vision for a progressive, activist court. Members of the legislative branch will now be forced to write laws that if challenged, will need to be constitutionally bulletproof. The Butterfly Effect of this will be a huge win for the security of rights for all people.
Burisma official reportedly linked to Joe Biden met with State officials in 2016, memos show
Vadym Pozharskyi’s contacts with USAID flagged for U.S. ambassador in 2016.
The Burisma Holdings executive who reportedly met with Joe Biden and his son Hunter in 2015 subsequently pitched the Obama administration’s foreign aid agency for business a year later, even as the Ukrainian gas company remained under a cloud of corruption suspicion, according to State Department memos obtained by Just the News. …
Pozharskyi’s contact with USAID officials was flagged in a Dec. 8, 2016 memo to U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, then the top American diplomat in Ukraine, as she prepared herself to meet with representatives of a Democratic firm named Blue Star Strategies that was leading Burisma’s campaign to end the corruption probes in Ukraine. …
Both the USAID meeting with Pozharskyi and the embassy’s meeting with Tramontano were remarkable given the deep concern State Department officials working in Ukraine held about Burisma and its alleged corrupt practices.
Those officials reported in February 2015 to the FBI that they had gathered evidence that Burisma had paid a $7 million bribe to Ukrainian prosecutors in an effort to make the corruption probes go away, previously released memos show. The U.S. officials also reported they believed Burisma had paid a second bribe in December 2016 by dumping cheap gas on the market and letting Ukrainian government officials buy it low and sell it high, memos show. …
Former U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission George Kent testified to the Senate recently that he believed Vice President Joe Biden created the appearance of a conflict of interest that undercut U.S. policy in Ukraine by continuing to preside over the U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine while his son worked for a firm under corruption investigation in the country.
Burisma’s own public relations site contains pictures and press releases showing Pozharskyi meeting with USAID officials as early as 2015 and meeting with Yovanovitch in both April 2017 and again in November 2017.
Pozharskyi burst into the public earlier Wednesday in a headline-grabbing story by the New York Post that claimed emails recovered from a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden suggested that the Burisma official met with Vice President Joe Biden in April 2015.
Biden’s campaign, which has previously denied the Democratic presidential nominee had any contact with his son’s business, did not directly deny a meeting took place, instead saying there was no record of it on the vice president’s official schedule. …
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/burisma-official-reportedly-linked-joe-biden-met-state
For more information go to the site above to get to the page and go to Dig In where all sorts of documents exist.
Example:
File
BurismaYovanovitchBribe2.pdf
File
BurismaYovanovitchBribe1.pdf
At the same site there will be a short interesting video where Hillary Clinton’s name comes up.
“Barrett and the ACA.”
-Professor Turley
______________
The ACA is unconstitutional and the question moot.
It is unconstitutional to compel taxation to fund charity.
How The Discourse works:
Democrats have a public discussion about maybe someday considering doing court expansion and get savaged by Republicans, and thus the press, for norm violation.
Republicans just go ahead and sabotage the Census for political gain to virtually no debate.
Former President Taft, a Republican, was nominated to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on June 30, 1921.
His appointment was approved the NEXT DAY.
Nothing so practical can be done these days.
The disgraceful spectacle of Kafkaesque hearings is due in part to the opportunity it presents for senators to perform for the cameras, but more seriously it is due to the encroachment of the judiciary into policy creation and legislation and, lately, the executive.
Congress can set the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Perhaps it is time for it to crop the nose, ears and tail of the judicial system and return it to a judicial body rather than allow it to continue as a dark, parallel government.
Start by ending the practice of district judges executing universal injunctions. Who in the hell do they think they are?
I don’t know why the dims are so against ACB. They can just kill her like they did Scalia and then incinerate the body before any autopsy can be done.
There is no indication he was cremated. He’s not in a memorial park limited to cremation graves. It was his family’s wish that there be no autopsy. There’s no mystery about his death. He was 79 years old, overweight, and diabetic.
Cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. are surging again after falling from a summer peak. And the spread to new areas of country suggests the outbreak is far from over. https://nyti.ms/2FursEQ
Everyone should go out and lick door knobs, stairwell railings, push elevator buttons with their tongues and get hair plugs like Amy Klobuchar.
OTOH, smoking crack from Hunter Biden’s pipe….that’s a deal breaker
Your point?
I fail to acknowledge them creating a new standard other than the one created for them by Mr. Putin a few days ago in likening them to the USSR’s commumnist party’. The standard they have set is replacing our Constitution with the Manifesto of that group and routinely violating their citizenship and Oath of ffice. Clearly not Americans looks like not even the millennials can stomach them.
Gen X is mostly behind Trump. but we got it, we don’t matter to either the Millenials or Boomers.
Why do you say that? US BOOMERS make all the MONEY. And Back TRUMP. How do you think Genx came to be?
Boomers who let the enemies of Western culture take over and entrench themselves so that eventually they could destroy our country with leftist nonsense.
Gen X is saddled with the coming debts of Boomers, while they still sit on the money.
Millenials will have even more debts to pay, and will lack the cultural tools to pay them, that Gen X got to watch be smashed to bits.
Trump is to a degree, a small rebellion fueled by Gen X’s quiet rage.
Trump is seen in different ways by different cohorts. He’s multifaceted. Whatever some Boomer sees in him, I probably see him differently. I see him as a big middle finger shown to the people who lost their minds, and their nerve, during the 60s. Some Millenials do too.
We were waiting for a guy who could both stick his thumb in the eye of the silkstocking Romney Republicants with one hand, and thumb in the eye of the Clintons with the other.
I sure hope he wins but if not I sure in hell loved it while it lasted … but we’ll know soon enough
Boomer Gen is like an elderly couple living high on the hog in a big cheaply made McMansion, that have let the place go to seed while they enjoy a long and comfy retirement
Behind the false front of prosperity lies a big HELOC that is more than the value of the home.
When they croak out, the younger generations may just let it go to foreclosure because there will be no other choice.
While I respect elderly persons, I do not respect the generation. It failed and let our country be slowly taken over by a tag team of anarchists and plutocrats who ruin everything
Trump was the exception, a diligent parent who paid attention to his kids instead of ignoring them, and yet still a hard worker, a man of long sighted and penetrating vision, who late in life did what he could to pull us back from disaster. I thank Mr Trump for his efforts even as I spit on the massive cultural and political failures of the Boomer generation as a whole.
Many of the grandchildren of the Boomers will be up against the wall and possibly slaughtered due to the results of the Boomer arrogance and incompetence. The time honored values that the “me generation” ignored kept us safe while they lasted, but are now smashed to pieces.
If every selfish old Boomer will just get off the couch and the golf course and partially redeem their failures with a vote for Trump I sure would appreciate it.
Gen X is getting old itself, not that we matter much. Maybe Trump was our last hurrah. The Boomer parent that a whole generation wished they had instead of whatever absentee parents we had who were so busy they gave rise to the term “latch key children.” Finally, an older generation person who had not failed to notice everything going to hell in handbasket and made a late stab at setting things right.
Well, maybe after Trump’s late stage rally, then the deluge. We are gonna find out soon.
You know if the Democrats get their blue wave expect about another 20 million immigrants over the next 8 years. The whole talk of generations will become meaningless anyhow because there will be no shared experience of American life to give the terms existential meaning.
If any of you people actually want America to endure as a viable entity, get out there and vote Trump and Red all the way down the ballot. Because the corrupt policies and social fragmentation that the Democrats thrive upon will eventually become too much to bear and fragmentation will occur. One imagines that may be inevitable but maybe with time we could work out a way so that when it comes it will be less painful. well, like i said, we soon gonna find out
really, who is an American?
make no mistake that question is on the ballot
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/
notice that the Democrats have not uttered a peep in 2020 about immigration. Trust me, they still have it on the agenda.
The last word was probably Joe Biden calling Trump a xenophobe for banning travellers from China. Well, funny how that BS fell silent. But it did not go away. The craving of the billionaire donors to the Democrats for more cheap foreign labor is insatiable. Expect fast and early action to throw the doors open again once the COVID blows ovder, if the Democrats are in charge
The argument Republicans make on judges is this:
“We had the power to stop Garland, so we did. We had the power to confirm Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, so we did that, too. And we will keep confirming as long as we have power. You would too, Democrats — if you could.”
Sorry about the double post. It didn’t show up initially, so I tried a different email to try to figure out the problem.
I am having similar problems.
The argument Republicans make on judges is this: “We had the power to stop Garland, so we did. We had the power to confirm Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, so we did that, too. And we will keep confirming as long as we have power. You would too, Democrats — if you could.”
The Barrett Rule
1. What if Mrs. Barrett was a Mr. Barrett? Is there an implicit sex/gender rule at play here?
2. What if Chairman Graham and Leader McConnell agreed to schedule the full Senate confirmation vote for mid-November 2020, after both the election and California v Texas? Have any Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said they would vote to confirm Mrs. Barrett under this circumstance? I heard a party-line vote on a Blumenthal resolution to postpone the vote until after the election, but I did not hear any Democrats say they wanted this postponement because they were otherwise inclined to vote, in Committee, on behalf of Judge Barrett.
They won’t postpone it. This comes asap, before the election. They have the votes and the vote has been set.
Nobody knows what chaos may be unleashed on election day. Disregard the lying pollsters, the election odds are close. the past four months of the past four years have revealed much entropy seeing into the system and it grows
Indeed, precisely insofar as none of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have communicated their intention to confirm Judge Barrett at a later date, what reason is there for Republicans to postpone the confirmation? If even a small minority of Democrats admitted that Judge Barrett is qualified, and put a willingness for bipartisan confirmation on the table, then Republicans would have some reason to postpone. As it stands, Democrats are trying to have it both ways, i.e., they want to disqualify Judge Barrett AND they want to postpone the vote.
Strategically, the Democratic case might be stronger if a minority (including Senator Feinstein) agreed to vote for Judge Barrett in Committee, on the grounds she is a qualified conservative woman nominee, but against her in the full Senate – if not at any time before the 2020 election, then especially prior to the passage of another Coronavirus Stimulus Bill – on the grounds such a confirmation would be 1) unduly insensitive to the priorities of a pandemic-stricken nation, and 2) contrary to the will (and due process) of the electorate.
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/icymi-history-side-republicans-filling-supreme-court-vacancy-2020
Brett Kavanaugh is the closest thing you get to a Mr. Barrett. Differences: by all appearances, he’s a mainstream suburban Catholic (though assiduously observant); he’s a native of the capital and his parents had connections up the wazoo (though a lot of those connections they developed after he was out of the house); he grew up an only child, not the eldest in a large brood as did Barrett. Both Barrett and Kavanaugh have been well-connected pretty much since they were admitted to the bar; in her case you wouldn’t attribute it to much but her academic performance landing her positions and then her performance there landing her recommendations. Kavanaugh might conceivably have had a leg up if the judge who hired him was acquainted with his parents or took phone calls from someone who was.
Being male, though, BK navigated adolescence somewhat differently, and his enemies used that against him. Thirty years ago, no one would have pretended to bother about that. Shameful adolescent behavior by young women is harder to repurpose, and the culture in which we live being what it is, people just pretend it’s something other than shameful.