Thank God.
"Senate confirms Barrett, delivering for Trump and reshaping the court" by Nicholas Fandos New York Times, October 26, 2020
The fix is already in, huh, and everybody knows it?
"Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination highlights the rise of Catholics on the Supreme Court" by Jazmine Ulloa Globe Staff, October 10, 2020
WASHINGTON — When Amy Coney Barrett emerged as President Trump’s likely nominee to the Supreme Court, a video clip of a tense exchange between her and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California circulated widely in conservative media.
“You are controversial. Let’s start with that,” said Feinstein, a Democrat, during Barrett’s 2017 confirmation hearing for the seat she now holds on the US Court of Appeals in Chicago. Then, Feinstein focused in on Barrett’s faith, questioning whether it could influence her rulings.
Barrett, 48, a former Notre Dame law professor, called herself a devout Roman Catholic but contended she could separate her religious beliefs from her legal decisions, yet, Feinstein said she and other Democrats felt “uncomfortable.”
“I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma,” said Feinstein, who is Jewish. “In your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”
So do political parties, and she is a fine one to talk!
What chutzpah, and why did Barr drop the inside stock trade investigation she and her husband made just before the COVID cra$h?!
Related:
That sort of pointed questioning, which some fear will resume as Barrett is vetted by the Senate judiciary committee, has been decried by congressional Republicans as the kind of antireligious bias and anti-Catholic bigotry that they believe is tearing at the fabric of American society, but, if it is tearing at the fabric, it certainly hasn’t held back the rise of Catholic judges. If Barrett is confirmed after Senate hearings set to begin Monday, Catholics would hold a 6-3 majority on the nation’s high court — just the second time that’s ever happened — and it would be an extremely conservative majority.
It's actually 5-4 since Roberts turned his coat.
Barrett, a mother of seven children, including two adopted from Haiti, is undoubtedly serious in her faith, and served on the pastoral council of her local Catholic church in South Bend, Ind. A former clerk for the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, she has garnered the adoration of conservative Christians and antiabortion activists for not just her religious convictions but also her skepticism, in speeches and rulings, of broad interpretations of a woman’s right to abortion.
I wonder if they are aware of Bill Clinton's pedo ring down there.
She is widely viewed as a likely vote to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion, and her connections to the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal group once on the fringe but now a powerhouse, and to People of Praise, a tight-knit faith community based on charismatic Catholicism that former members say teaches that wives should submit to the will of their husbands, have drawn concern among Democrats and women’s groups opposing her nomination.
The rise of Catholics on the Supreme Court, which long had been dominated by white men of mainline Protestant faith, is striking for a denomination that only includes about a fifth of US adults and was once so stigmatized that many Americans worried that Catholic politicians would be more loyal to the pope than to the nation. Still, historians said it’s difficult to unravel just how much religion rather than ideology has factored into a solid Supreme Court majority and whether, or how, the faith of those justices affects their rulings.
“I think the question is — and I am not sure of the answer — are they conservative judges who happen to be Catholic?” asked Margaret McGuinness, a religion professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
The five Catholics on the court are Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Neil Gorsuch was raised Catholic but now attends a Protestant church. The other justices, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, are Jewish, as was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose seat Barrett would take.
Most of the 13 Catholic justices who have served on the Supreme Court have been nominated by Republican presidents amid a decline of anti-Catholic discrimination, a rise in the number of Catholic lawyers, and an unlikely alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians that formed in backlash to the progress of the civil rights movements of the 1960s. They now sit on a court that has become a heavy cudgel in the culture wars, increasingly using the Constitution’s free exercise of religion clause to rule for churches over other interests, and issuing decisions that critics said often work to the detriment of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community.
That clause is misunderstood and often disingenuously presented as separation of church and state. What it actually says is the state may not establish a religion, nor may it prohibit the exercise thereof. People think it means no religion.
As with any religion, believers in Catholicism span the political spectrum. Catholic registered voters are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, according to polls by the Pew Research Center, and Catholics, liberal and conservative, hold varying views on matters like abortion and immigration that track less with doctrine than with their core political beliefs, according to Pew.
Sotomayor, nominated by Barack Obama, has emerged as the liberal conscience on the Supreme Court, an ardent defender of immigrants, people of color, and criminal defendants. She is the first and only justice of Latin American descent, and Sotomayor’s ideology underscores a split among Catholics more broadly: 68 percent of Latino Catholic registered voters are or lean Democratic, Pew polling shows, while 57 percent of white Catholic registered voters are or lean Republican.
That is a massive amount of Latinos for Trump to scoop up!
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who would be the second Catholic president should he win, has often leaned on his faith. During the first presidential debate, he highlighted his working-class upbringing in Pennsylvania and took a jab at Trump, saying “guys” like him and his friends would “look down their nose on people like Irish Catholics, like me, who grew up in Scranton.”
Petto Joe is like the priests.
“People tend to think we all march to the beat of the same drummer,” said Thomas H. Groome, professor in theology and religious education at Boston College, who wrote the book of “Faith of the Heart.” “There is no lockstep Catholic vote; there is no lockstep position. All the Catholics don’t agree.”
The first Catholic justice, Roger Taney, joined the bench in 1836. A man of faith and a lawyer who defended an abolitionist preacher, calling slavery a “blot on our national character,” he nonetheless wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery, demeaned Black people as unfit for citizenship, and fueled the tensions that led to the American Civil War.
It took nearly 60 years for another Catholic to join the court.
The waves of Irish, German, and Polish immigrants from Central Europe, who arrived in the United States beginning in the mid-19th century, hugely increased the numbers and influence of Catholics in America, but those newcomers also often encountered harassment, nativism, and raw prejudice, driven in part by fear of their belief in the doctrinal infallibility of the pope.
“People had the idea that there was a Romanist conspiracy, that Catholics couldn’t be real Americans because their allegiance would be to the pope and not the US Constitution,” said Rebecca Brückmann, an assistant professor of North American history at Ruhr-University, Germany.
For much of the 20th century, there was an informal tradition, not consistently followed by presidents making court nominations, that there would be a Catholic seat and a Jewish seat on the court. No two Catholics served together until the 1980s. Catholics gained the majority for the first time with the swearing in of Alito in January 2006, and have held it ever since. The number increased to six when Sotomayor joined the court in 2009, but dropped back down to five after Scalia died in 2016.
“From the Puritans to the Framers and beyond, anti-'popery' was thick in the cultural air breathed by the early Americans,” Richard Garnett, a Notre Dame law professor, wrote that year in a newsletter for the university’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Still, he said the new religious majority on the court indicated “that Catholicism is no longer regarded — or, at least, may not publicly be regarded — as particularly anti-American.”
The ascension of Catholics on the court has come amid a political realignment after World War II, when anti-communists, social traditionalists, and other conservatives began to forge new alliances. The so-called religious right movement in politics was fueled in large measure by opposition to changes pushed by civil rights activists in the 1960s. Disdain was especially directed at Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the court as it handed down landmark rulings that banned racial segregation in public schools, expanded rights for women, and provided equal access to justice for criminal defendants who could not afford lawyers.
The implication is religious conservatives are racist.
Conservative Catholics and evangelicals found common ground, forming an influential part of the base of the Republican Party, despite some fundamental disagreements over doctrine.
“Praying to the Virgin Mary, believing the bread and blood of Christ is literal bread and blood of Christ ... some evangelicals don’t believe Catholics are a true Christian faith because of these things,” said Stephanie Martin, an associate professor of political communication at Southern Methodist University, and, for some Catholics, the reverse has been true.
Still, it has been Catholics, not evangelicals, who have been able to climb the fastest through the legal ranks. Earlier discrimination pushed Catholics to create their own parochial schools and universities, institutions such as Notre Dame and Boston College that sought to provide a broad curriculum, teaching divine and natural law.
Interest in the legal profession grew as Catholic families saw law and medicine as paths to the middle class. Catholic education also has been an impetus for many Catholics to enter public life; the Jesuits, in particular, often encourage people to live out their faith in the service of God and society. By contrast, evangelical schools are newer, and evangelical communities, which range from small Southern Baptists congregations to nondenominational megachurches, are more insular and lack cultural cohesion.
As Republicans have sought religious conservatives for the bench, the pool of Catholics has offered more options.
“It’s basically supply and demand,” Brückmann said, “and so they are not chosen for their religion, they are chosen for their politics.”
Overturning Roe v. Wade, opposing LGBTQ rights, and protecting the nuclear heterosexual family have been the most tangible goals for this wing of conservative jurists, scholars said, but the dispute between the conservative and progressive approach to jurisprudence also often rests on how much power the federal government has to compel states to protect individual rights and individual identities at the expense at what they regard to be traditional values, Martin said.
“It often gets distilled into the question over reproductive rights, but it is about much more than that,” she said.
Despite their rise to power and influence, religious conservatives — mainly white evangelicals — have continued to see themselves under attack, and so, for some, Feinstein’s questioning of Barrett evoked similar probing of Thomas and Roberts over their ability to decide cases independent of the tenets of their faith, and it is being brought up again now, as the confirmation process for Barrett begins at a double-time pace.
Same with the Jews!
Feelings remain raw. Speaking to group of Catholic lawyers in New Jersey in 2017, Alito recalled staying up to watch John F. Kennedy’s 1960 election as the first Roman Catholic president, feeling “it had lifted me up from the status of second-class American.”
Pointing to a Democratic lawmaker’s objection to his own nomination in 2005 because he’d make “too many Catholics on the court,” Alito declared the nation’s commitment to religious liberty was under fire, but civil rights activists and public interest groups said they don’t object to the justices’ religion but to their records and remarks on and off the bench. Some 150 organizations have urged the Senate to block Barrett’s nomination, pointing to her stances on the Affordable Care Act’s guarantee of birth control, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and criminal justice.
“It is really Democrats who are mobilized when thinking about the future of the court,” said Janelle Wong, government and politics professor at the University of Maryland, and Barrett’s potential to galvanize the left comes as fissures in the religious right alliance that made the Supreme Court’s conservative majority possible are starting to widen along class and racial lines, as many Black, Latino, and Asian Catholics and evangelicals have long been moving away from the broader political agenda, she and others said.
Concerns flared up again Monday when Thomas and Alito blasted the landmark decision granting marriage rights to same-sex couples, as the Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal of a former county clerk in Kentucky who was jailed after refusing to issue marriage licenses out of a religious objection to same-sex marriage.
Will that 2015 decision survive a court with six conservative justices? There is well-founded fear among liberals that, as with Roe, it will not.
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If nothing else, Barrett has shattered stereotypes while not getting bogged down in the hearings.
Related:
Politics has way of finding Supreme Court eager to avoid it
The touchy issue is being directed there by someone who has an unattractively condescending quality to her -- unlike this woman, who has an air of humility about her:
Judge Amy Coney Barrett (Doug Mills/NYT).
Parties offer divergent portraits of Barrett ahead of today’s Senate hearings
I'm not saying she is perfect, but who is?
The transformation of Lindsey Graham
Jess Bidgood of the Globe Staff says he is a political chameleon in the mold of Joe Tynan.
Ex-members of religious group mixed on Barrett nomination
Baker, Sununu do not sign GOP governors’ letter supporting Coney Barrett nomination to Supreme Court"
To be honest with you, that can only help her cause.
The battle is upon us.
Parties offer dueling views of Barrett as confirmation fight enters into Tuesday
Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett was sworn into her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill (Patrick Semansky/Pool/AFP via Getty Images).
A slim majority of voters oppose Barrett hearings
So says a Washington Compost-ABC poll as 21 protesters were arrested on first day of Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
Barrett, declining to detail legal views, says she will not be ‘a pawn’ of Trump
That is as she is haunted by Trump’s demands, and the consensus of analysis from the New York Times is that her testimony is a deft mix of expertise and evasion as the Supreme Court, without comment, refused Tuesday to revive an attempt by Democratic members of Congress to sue President Trump over his private businesses accepting payments from foreign governments, while the Boston Globe says it should be a clarion call for lawmakers to act to protect health care, reproductive rights, and our elections amidst the changing deadlines and accuracy concerns in a Supreme Court decision that could ripple through the years.
Barrett, Revealing Little, Suggests She Might Preserve Health Law
It's a female privilege to change one's mind despite the track record.
The Affordable Care Act and coverage for Massachusetts residents is at risk
Over 375,000 Massachusetts residents could lose their health coverage and the state stands to lose up to $2.4 billion in federal funds if the ACA is overturned by the Supreme Court, according to Elizabeth Warren, Amy Rosenthal, and Kate Walsh, and Warren also criticized Walt Disney Co. for laying off thousands of workers as a result of the pandemic, saying its spending on share buybacks and executive pay enriched bosses and investors.
Her colleague, Edward J. Markey, says an accurate census ensures equity is under threat with the Supreme Court ruling this week that allows the Trump administration to end the census count early, and he is joined by Iván Espinoza-Madrigal and Martin J. Walsh, who says ending census early will leave parts of Boston uncounted, possibly resulting in less aid because it is not just women’s rights at stake with Amy Coney Barrett on the bench.
Supreme Court to review two of Trump’s major immigration policies
Meanwhile, a coalition of prosecutors and attorneys general across U.S. are vowing to defy the Court and not to enforce antiabortion laws as the issue is correctly sent back to the states as the Democrats decry the sham of the cardboard-cutout proceedings and shifting lines in the sand.
What they fail to recognize is the legacy she leaves for women after living an amazing and transformative life that was propelled by the sudden resurgence of the conservative legal movement.
"Over Democratic fury, Republicans push Barrett to brink of confirmation" by Nicholas Fandos New York Times, October 25, 2020
WASHINGTON — A sharply divisive drive to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court before Election Day wound Sunday toward its expected end as Senate Republicans overcame Democratic protests to limit debate and set up a final confirmation vote for Monday.
Two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined united Democrats in an attempt to filibuster President Trump’s nominee, and Democrats once again planned a flurry of parliamentary tactics to protest a vote that they say should wait until after the election, but Republicans had the simple majority they needed to blow past them, setting up the vote to confirm Barrett just eight days before the election and a month to the day after she was chosen.
Republicans, who have been on a mad dash to fill the vacancy caused by the death last month of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, planned to keep the Senate in session overnight to speed things up further. Thirty hours must elapse between the vote to limit debate and final confirmation. For an aging body that prefers light working hours, the unusual all-nighter only underscored what was at stake. Barrett’s ascension would lock in a 6-3 conservative majority on the court.
Try 5-4.
Democrats took unusual steps to try to color the confirmation process as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans, who had blockaded a Supreme Court nominee from President Obama in 2016, citing the coming election that year. Democrats insisted a quorum be present to conduct any business, unusually drawing most senators into the chamber at once, but with the election at hand, their goal was not so much to stop the confirmation as to use it as a rallying cry for their voter base.
The "illegitimate power grab" was completely constitutional!
Partisan fights over the direction of the federal courts have escalated rapidly in recent years, as Congress has ceased to regularly legislate and both parties have increasingly looked to the courts to enact their visions for the country, but the confirmation wars appeared to be headed to a new, bitter low Monday. For the first time in recent memory, not a single member of the minority party — in this case, the Democrats — was expected to vote for confirmation. A single Democrat, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, had supported Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
Democrats oppose Barrett ideologically, but their opposition has little to do with the nominee herself. With more than 50 million votes already cast, Democrats have insisted the winner of the election should be allowed to fill the seat. They have accused Republicans of rank hypocrisy for rushing to fill it despite prior assurances by several senior Republicans that they would not do so if a vacancy opened in an election year and despite Republicans’ insistence in 2016 that voters be given a say in who fills the seat.
Collins and Murkowski, two moderates who have frequently bucked their party, have shared those concerns, warning that to fill the seat now would erode the legitimacy of the court and the Senate.
At 48, Barrett would be the youngest justice on the bench, poised to put an imprint on the law for decades to come. An appeals court judge in Chicago and a Notre Dame law professor, she has been presented as an heir to former Justice Antonin Scalia, a towering figure of the court’s conservative wing for decades. Barrett clerked for Scalia and shares his strict judicial philosophy.
In her confirmation hearings this month, Barrett repeatedly described herself as a true independent with “no agenda.” Neither party in the Senate, though, appears to believe she will be anything but a reliably conservative vote based on her academic writing and appeals court rulings. If that bears out, Barrett would be the ideological opposite of her predecessor, Ginsburg, who was the leader of the court’s now-diminished liberal wing.
Democrats have used that prospect to fire up their liberal base before Election Day. Trump has promised to appoint justices who would chip away at or overturn abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade, and Democrats have spent weeks warning that Barrett would do just that. They also say she would rule against the Affordable Care Act when the court hears a challenge to Democrats’ signature health care law just a week after the election.
Sunday’s anticipated parliamentary tactics from Democrats were nothing new. For weeks now, they have deployed the few tools at the minority party’s disposal to try to highlight their case, including boycotting a vote on the nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday, another first, but inside the chamber, the outcome has not been in doubt. Republicans, compelled by the chance to install a third Trump-nominated justice, had already lined up 51 of their members in support of confirmation. Then on Saturday, Murkowski said she would be a 52nd. Despite her opposition to moving forward Sunday, Murkowski had already conceded that she had lost the procedural argument and said she would vote Monday to elevate Barrett.....
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"Women in red cloaks march on State House, advocate for reproductive freedom" by Lucas Phillips Globe Correspondent, October 25, 2020
More than a dozen cloaked figures slowly marched toward the State House Sunday morning with a simple message: “Ruth sent us.”
With proceedings to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underway and a bill that would ease access to abortion in Massachusetts before the Legislature, advocates rallied at the steps for abortion rights.
“We’re all mad as hell and we’re rising up to show we won’t go peacefully into this dystopian world of actual handmaids,” said Lora Venesy, who dressed as the late justice and led the group to the State House steps.
Fight the Great Re$et instead!
The group of about two dozen were dressed as justices, suffragettes, and the Statue of Liberty, with the majority clad in red cloaks and white bonnets, a nod to Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which depicts a misogynistic dystopia. A television show based on the book is set in the Boston area.
“It’s a terrifying novel that should stay fiction,” Venesy told the roughly 40 who gathered to watch the group, who joined other “red cloak” protests around the country.
They are correct; however, it is the very people they think are on their side that are behind what they fear.
Advocates at the event decried what they said was an “imminent” threat to abortion access across the country as a Republican majority in the US Senate swiftly moves Amy Coney Barrett toward confirmation to fill Ginsburg’s seat on the court, but although the judge’s confirmation is probably a foregone conclusion, speakers said there is more to be done in the Bay State as well, beginning with the passage of a bill that has languished in the Legislature.
“The need for the ROE Act existed in full force long before Trump became president, long before Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, long before Amy Coney Barrett got nominated,” said state Senator Rebecca L. Rausch, a co-sponsor of the bill.
She criticized the legislators who passed the current abortion legislation in the state in the 1970s in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which established women’s legal right to abortions.
“I don’t know about you, but I am not comfortable letting legislators from the ’70s decide for my constituents, for me, for our children, and for their children to come, whether, when, and how to parent,” she said.
Or not.
“If — and every day seeming more likely when — we lose Roe V. Wade at the federal level either by outright overturning or by gutting it so extensively that it does not exist anymore functionally, it will be up to the states to figure out how to ensure reproductive freedom for every person in this nation,” Rausch said.
Which is where it should be.
A group of about two dozen were dressed as justices, suffragettes, and the Statue of Liberty, with the majority clad in red cloaks and white bonnets, a nod to Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale," which depicts a misogynistic dystopia.
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Related:
Wellington appoints its first female CEO
In Atwood's book, she is one of the mean and nasty elites that can't bear children after the storm of Islamic Law as the birth is now in God's hands even with the sedatives.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Now I lay me down to sleep.....
Pope Francis appoints first Black American cardinal
He has zero-tolerance for sexual abuse.
Pope Francis voices support for same-sex civil unions
It's a significant break from his predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people as the plot thickens over the origins of the pope’s civil union endorsement that is not an endorsement of homosexual activity but which does drag the Catholic Church into the 20th century with advocates cautiously optimistic:
"For the first time, a clergy sex abuse trial opened Wednesday in the Vatican’s criminal tribunal, with one priest accused of molesting an altar boy in the Vatican’s youth seminary and another priest accused of covering it up. The case concerns the closed world of the St. Pius X youth seminary, a palazzo inside the Vatican walls just across the street from where Pope Francis lives and the criminal tribunal itself. The seminary, which is run by a Como, Italy-based association of priests, serves as a residence for boys aged 12 to 18, who serve as altar boys at papal Masses in St. Peter’s Basilica....."
"A day after donning a face mask for the first time during a liturgical service, Pope Francis was back to his mask-less old ways Wednesday despite surging coronavirus infections across Europe and growing criticism of his behavior and the example he is setting. Francis shunned a face mask again during his Wednesday general audience in the Vatican auditorium, and didn’t wear one when he greeted a half-dozen mask-less bishops at the end. He shook hands and leaned in to chat privately with each one. While the clerics wore masks while seated during the audience, all but one took his mask off to speak to the pope. Only one kept it on, and by the end of his tete-a-tete with Francis, had lowered it under his chin....."
By the grace of God goes he -- along with the Dutch King:
"The Dutch king issued a video message Wednesday saying he had “regret in the heart” and he shouldn’t have flown to Greece for a family vacation last week, a trip that was quickly broken off amid public uproar back home where people are being urged to stay home as much as possible to battle the coronavirus. “It hurts to have betrayed your faith in us,” a somber King Willem-Alexander said in the video, which shows him sitting next to his wife, Queen Maxima, at their palace in a forest in The Hague....."
That's why they are laughing:
