The first day of the Senate hearing was a defamatory and sexist spectacle to confirm Amy Connie Barrett in the Supreme Court.
The first was the simple fact that the hearing was all being held. With 21,00,000 people killed and the American economy devastated, an epidemic continues to plague the United States. Millions of Americans are out of work, struggling to pay rent or mortgages, worried about how they will afford groceries. Republicans in the Senate may not get to pass an epidemic relief bill that Americans desperately need, but they can demand that just days before the presidential election is over, the Judiciary Committee be jammed by a radical right-wing judge. – and possibly fought by a president who has already refused for a peaceful transition of power.
In February of the election year, after the death of Mitch McConnell, similar hearings were blocked to replace Justice Antonin Scalia after his death, the fact that the hearing is being conducted altogether is also serious. At the time, McConnell and the Republican Party insisted that confirming justice would be inappropriate and would undermine the legitimacy of the court. Even months before the election, he said, it was up to the American people to decide who would appoint the new judge. McConnell also blocked the Senate from hearing President Barack Obama’s candidate, Merrick Garland. At that time, Amy Connie Barrett went on television And he said it would be inappropriate to change Scalia in an election year – and that it would be particularly inappropriate to replace “radical money on the court” with liberals because “it’s not a side move.”
Now it’s election year – and it’s much closer to the election than Scalia, who died in 2016. The justice that is changing is Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of the staunchest liberals on the court. The woman nominated to replace him is a true money changer – not a sidekick. Yet, all of these ritualists, from McConnell to Senate Republicans to Barrett, are happy to move forward because, this time, they have the power.
The hearing was also held indoors, as the rate of infection with an airborne virus is increasing across the country. Mike Lee, a Republican senator, attended the hearing and recently removed his mask despite testing positive for Covid-19. He seems to have caught the virus at a party celebrating M’s Connie Barrett nomination, resulting in a Super Spreader incident as Ground Zero with the White House. Lee, a self-described pro-life legislator, insisted on attending the hearing anyway, putting everyone in the room, and accusing the support staff of cleaning up afterwards, in a damaging way – all of which self-described “pro-life” The Supreme Court nominee who will accept the honest man was chosen because the president believes he will defeat Rowe v. Wade, fight with him in the election, and deprive millions of Americans of their health care by invalidating the Affordable Care Act.
It would all be bad enough, but the hearing was a strategy of how practically Rs. Men approach skilled women. There is no question that Barrett is well respected among his Notre Dame colleagues and the conscientious lawyers and judges who have clerked and worked with him say he has a sharp legal mind. Yet every Republican had the opportunity to talk about Barrett’s status as a mother and generally stressed that she has seven children, many of whom are still school-age. Her mother’s abilities, as well as her professional accomplishments, were a testament to her leadership abilities and her introduction as a role model for young girls.
There is nothing wrong with believing that Barrett is a mom or welcoming her children into the room (although I question the wisdom of having six children in a room with a covid patient and many others that were recently exposed). It is not uncommon for the Judiciary Committee to refer to the nominee’s parental status. What Is Unusual, however, each member of a party to bring it more than once, and also to emphasize it as a bench qualification. Multiple Republican senators noted that, for example, Barrett would be the first female justice with school-age children – a little stretch, and it’s hard to imagine a so-called man talking about it. Do we know who was the first male Supreme Court judge with school-age children? Or will he even register?
The message from the Republicans seemed to be that Barrett was especially admirable as a woman because of his large family. It is an old sexist trope, that a woman’s value is based on her fertility – and children, or a large number of children, suggest that a woman is more honest and ready to accept her natural mother’s role. It is also an ethnic point of view: white women with large families are often praised by Rs servists, while black and brown women with large families are condemned.
Republicans and more often say that Barrett’s personal life, including his faith, should have limits. And yet they repeatedly raised his personal life, including his faith, as an asset. What they claim is to use Barrett’s private life as both a sword and a shield: an argument in her favor, but one that cannot be denied or even questioned on her own terms, as doing so would criticize her. Imposing private beliefs and “religious testing”.
It was a pose of numbers from start to finish. It was also a show of disrespect for American women, who wanted a professional assessment of our qualifications – not just our family.
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