Kamala Harris may have found her true anti-self in Judge Amy Coney Barrett
You couldn’t exactly detect it at Tuesday night’s first-in-the-cycle presidential debate (or was it a slug fest?), but Democrats are terrified. They’re not apprehensive of losing the election, mind you, since liberals always assume Americans are mindlessly attracted to their point-of-view by pounding certain winning (not!) issues like… President Donald Trump’s personality and twitchy Twitter fingers, or the slowly rising death toll from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or Wuhan, if you prefer) virus, or “climate change” rearing its fiery head in the western states.
No, the Democrats’ true bugaboo was a late arrival in this year’s political calculus, in the form of a 48-year-old Catholic mother of seven (including two adopted children from Haiti). Alas, the person of Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, scares the bejesus out of them, precisely because the lawyer is so “normal”, brilliant and non-threatening.
Of particular concern to the liberal set is the upcoming confirmation hearings where the party’s vice president nominee will come face-to-face with Barrett on multiple occasions. As a prominent member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kamala Harris will question the would-be high court justice on her background and judicial philosophy. Might Americans discover that Kamala maybe isn’t such a smiley, great gal after all?
Naomi Lim reported at The Washington Examiner, “Harris has already indicated she's leaning toward a politicized assault. She issued a statement through her Senate press office last weekend shortly after Trump tapped Barrett for the country's highest court, the third vacancy he's had to fill during his first term.
“Prior to that, she's repeatedly used language such as ‘fight,’ while 2020 Democratic standard-bearer Biden has urged Senate Republicans to uphold their constitutional oaths of office. ‘With the next Supreme Court Justice set to determine the fate of protections for those with preexisting health conditions, and reproductive health options, I will continue to fight on behalf of the people and strongly oppose the president’s nomination,’ Harris wrote Saturday.”
While Harris’s statement was overtly honest and hardly unexpected, isn’t it her sworn, constitutional duty as a senator to impartially consider every executive appointment and provide “advice and consent” on the nomination? If not for hypocrisy, Democrats would have nothing at all, but aren’t they imploring Republicans senators to “do their constitutional duty” by delaying or refusing to vote on Barrett as a potential replacement for liberal lioness Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg while still preemptively announcing their opposition to the candidate?
Lim’s article offers a couple different schools of thought on whether Harris should go all-out to attack Barrett or hold back and try to appear non-political in this all-important hour of public scrutiny. Anyone who watched Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings two years ago remembers Harris sitting up on the dais, inappropriate smirk on her face and ordering the man to respond to “yes or no” questions that really called for a ton of elaboration regarding the circumstances.
Back then, Harris reveled in the attention from being “Prosecutor Kamala” and mugged for the cameras as a certain-to-be presidential candidate looking to distinguish herself as a no-nonsense liberal ideologue who wouldn’t take anything but “yes” or “no” for an answer. Law students and lawyers recognize the interrogation tactic, as clearly Kavanaugh did at the time. Demanding an up or down retort from a witness is a means of impressing upon the jury a clear impression of guilt or innocence.
Only Harris wasn’t moving a case before a fact finder (a judge or a jury), she was simply trying to determine whether Kavanaugh could be counted on to rubber stamp precedents that preserve whatever it is that liberals want at a given moment. Another way to put it is, “Will you bow down before me and swear upon your family, your faith and your whole being that your own views regarding political issues won’t influence your vote on our court cases?”
Everyone knew what was going on. Harris was planning a run for president and needed to sound “tough” to Democrat primary voters as well as sufficiently angry and vindictive to combat anything Republicans would throw at her. We saw similar behavior in her primary debate performances when she verbally abused her opponents -- primarily Biden himself and then later on, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. The Californian would stare directly at the camera during her opening statements as though speaking directly to Trump, saying in effect, “I’m only five foot two but I’m meaner than you and if I’m face-to-face with you, I’ll apply a can of whup a--.”
Kamala and fellow Dems obviously felt empowered to assault the character of someone like Brett Kavanaugh because he represented everything they despise. As a white male who attended a private school in Georgetown surrounded by kids you might find staffing a Christian youth choir, liberals felt a duty to somehow make him sound evil. They delved into his decades’ old habit of jotting down everything he did in a journal. They asked him about his yearbook scribblings with terminology such as “boof” -- referring to flatulence.
And he liked suds. A high school kid liking beer! Perish the thought! It’s highly improbable that Barrett’s high school yearbook relays a fondness for underaged drinking and passing gas, though.
Democrats won’t find it as easy sledding this time, as Barrett doesn’t neatly fit the stereotype of a person they’d like to destroy. It’s true, she is white -- but skin color alone isn’t enough to completely discount the woman, especially when she has two adopted kids “of color.” Black radicals have assaulted Barrett for her family’s choice to take in two African-ancestry youths from a hopelessly impoverished Caribbean nation, but given Harris’s Jamaican slaveholding lineage, it isn’t likely she’s itching to touch this subject.
Given that running mate Grampa Joe Biden is Catholic (in name only), it’s also unlikely that Harris would pull a Dianne Feinstein and say something as outlandishly bold as, “The dogma lives loudly withinyou, and that’s a concern.” The Democrat vice president nominee doesn’t appear to observe much religion and she doesn’t have any children of her own (her husband has a daughter and son from a previous marriage -- they reportedly call her ‘Momala’).
But if there’s something out there in Barrett’s personal past, Democrats will find it. And if they don’t discover anything potentially damaging, they’ll make it up. If Harris goes overboard in prosecuting a case against Barrett, it will blow her media-created sham cover as a “moderate” gal who could just as easily be found playing in the backyard with underprivileged orphans as running for the next-in-line to the nation’s highest office.
And it goes without saying, Harris wouldn’t get far in trolling Barrett for her views on the CCP virus, which is Grampa Joe’s go-to issue these days. The virus will certainly come up within the context of Democrats’ assault on Barrett on healthcare (and the possibility of overturning the badly mislabeled Affordable Care Act, a.k.a., Obamacare), but what does treatment of a world pandemic have to do with jurisprudence and interpreting the law?
It’s even somewhat iffy as to whether Harris will probe Barrett on abortion. As mentioned above, Kamala never birthed a child (not impugning her lack of production, just saying) and would look flat-out heinous if she lectures a mother who has seven about “women’s right to choose” and feminist doctrine. There aren’t a lot of champions of haggish, bra-burning mean-girl types out there, even if there’s a vocal contingent of Planned Parenthood supporters on the coasts and in Hollywood.
Women are “strong” without having to proclaim it. I simply cannot think of a single example of a woman like “All in the Family’s” fictional Edith Bunker who stands behind her man and keeps silent while the bigot spouts epithets and shouts at the TV. More and more women are their family’s breadwinners, and men have taken a much larger role in child-raising. Would Kamala Harris win anyone over by blasting Barrett for being pro-life?
To Democrats, 2020 is all about bribing voters on healthcare… and Trump
Nobody needs to point out that Democrats don’t have much to say on issues these days. Grampa Joe Biden did introduce several proposals a while back about “buying American”, “investing” 700 million dollars in manufacturing and creating jobs, etc., but we haven’t heard much about them after the Democrat convention.
One issue in which Democrats see an opening is healthcare. From Naomi Lim’s story cited above, “Democratic strategists insist the healthcare argument is more persuasive to voters than criticizing McConnell for being a hypocrite. But Harris deployed both arguments Monday during a Biden campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina. She argued, too, that Barrett threatened voting rights and ‘our ability to make a living, take care of our families, and dismantle systemic racism.’
“’We will not let the infection that President Trump has injected into the presidency and into Congress, that has paralyzed our politics and pitted Americans against each other, spread to the United States Supreme Court,’ she said.”
Here, too, Kamala Harris will have difficulties convincing people that a Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a threat to anyone’s financial -- or physical -- well-being. Democrats drone on and on about Obamacare and the evil Republicans seeking to abolish it. As previously stated, through regulatory action and the 2017 tax law, the Trump administration has already gotten rid of the health care monolith’s most damaging provisions.
It boils down to the liberal party’s fondness for government control versus the GOP’s preference for market-oriented solutions. The goals are the same -- getting everyone insured, but Republicans aren’t about to require fifty-year-old males to purchase maternity coverage. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all insurance policy for people, and some folks would rather buy something they need rather than what the government tells them to do. Both parties agree on the necessity of covering pre-existing conditions. President Trump has mentioned it numerous times.
Democrats like Harris and Biden use the issue to frighten people. Similar to their scare demagoguery regarding Republican efforts to get the budget under control a decade ago, they rely on ignorance and certain elements of the public’s entitlement mentality to get what they want. In the midst of a pandemic, all Democrats do is dangle the “Republicans want you to die from COVID-19” -- and the fearmongering works.
Why is liberty and individual choice such a hard sell? We may never learn the answer but it’s unlikely that the ditching of Obamacare would result in catastrophic health consequences to anyone. Any legislation passed to replace it would take care of the rough spots. Confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court won’t affect a citizen’s healthcare -- at all.
And here’s betting that most people don’t love abortion nearly as much as the far left does. Joe Biden asked a few weeks ago, “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” Well, Amy Coney Barrett could ask, “Do I look like someone who’s against women’s rights and health insurance??
What will the American people decide?
Democrats don’t understand the judiciary and they don’t care
How many times since last Saturday have liberals and Democrats accused President Trump of a “power grab” for moving forward with an appointment? Why would confirming a replacement for a departed justice be looked upon as unconstitutional?
Juan Williams wrote at The Hill, “If Barrett is confirmed, there is nothing stopping the new 6-3 conservative majority on the Court from overturning Roe v. Wade and denying millions of American women the right to an abortion.
“The new Trump majority on the Court could also move to roll back same-sex marriage and legal protections prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. There is nothing to stop Trump’s team on the court from striking down the Affordable Care Act and legal protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
“Democrats are on the verge of being run over on the Supreme Court. But the Founding Fathers and their heirs will mourn the loss of an independent judiciary.”
Juan is just doing his political job, but an “independent judiciary” is the last thing Democrats want. Textualists such as Antonin Scalia -- and now Amy Coney Barrett -- merely require legislation to conform to the language of the Constitution. If the court upholds religious freedom, it doesn’t curtail rights at all. If anything, it guarantees freedom of belief and worship.
Legislatures create rights, not the courts. Liberals don’t want to do the work, and they rely on ignorance to adopt their aims when they couldn’t ever get them passed into law.
All eyes will be on Kamala Harris when she questions Amy Coney Barrett in the latter’s upcoming senate confirmation hearings. Like all Democrats, Harris sees an originalist court as a threat to her political power. The problem is Barrett embodies the integrity and intelligence that liberals fear most, a jurist who holds the law above politics.
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