Amy Coney Barrett wants you to know she isn't a partisan hack

Please allow me to tell you how full of shit she is.

Have you ever heard of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship?  I hadn’t either until I read that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave a speech on Sunday at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.  Reports on CNN and elsewhere said that the subject of her speech was the non-partisan nature of the court she serves on. 

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” Barrett told her audience at the event she was invited to speak at by that well-known non-partisan non-hack, the Senate Minority Leader.  Nobody would accuse Mitch of being partisan, not the man who as Majority Leader denied Merrick Garland a hearing before the Senate after he was appointed to the court by then President Barrack Obama and then crammed through the nominations of those three well known non-partisan non-hacks:  Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, whose nomination was rushed through in 30 days just before Republicans lost control of the presidency and the Senate in the 2020 election.  Not the husband of that other non-partisan non-hack, Elaine Chao, who served loyally as Secretary of Transportation under that non-partisan non-hack President Donald Trump.

"Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties," she explained on Sunday.  Justice Barrett said she identifies as an “originalist” as opposed to Justice Stephen Breyer who she identified as a “pragmatist.”  The judicial philosophy of “originalism” is most closely identified with former Justice Antonin Scalia, another non-partisan non-hack on the court for whom Barrett clerked after graduating from Notre Dame Law School.  Originalist justices claim to follow the text of laws and the Constitution exactly as written and not impose any other judicial philosophies on their decisions. 

Riiiiiight.

Barrett was asked after her speech about the court’s recent decision in an emergency appeal of the Texas fetal heartbeat law in a case it took on its so-called “shadow docket.”  The court refused to issue a stay of the law pending a federal lawsuit filed against it, thus allowing the law to go into effect. Barrett sided with the five-vote majority that decided the case without hearing arguments about the law on the merits. Everyone associated with passage of the law and everyone involved on either side of the abortion issue in Texas agrees that the law has effectively banned abortion in the state because it bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.  Barrett told the questioner that it would be “inappropriate” for her to answer the question because more “emergency” appeals under the court’s so-called “shadow docket” may come before her.

“Here's the thing,” Barrett told the questioner. “Sometimes, I don't like the results of my decisions. But it's not my job to decide cases based on the outcome I want."

Double riiiiiight, Amy.

Barrett is a lifelong Catholic and member of an arch-conservative off-shoot of the church known as “People of Praise,” where she has served as a “Handmaiden.”

But it is her association with the Blackstone Legal Fellowship that is most revealing about her non-partisan non-hackhood.  Funded by the arch-conservative Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, the Blackstone Legal Fellowship is an annual incubation camp for future non-partisan non-hacks destined for the upper reaches of the judiciary and conservative political leadership.  The Fellowship is funded by such conservative foundations as the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, the DeVos Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation. 

Here is the way the Blackstone Legal Fellowship is described on its own website: “Its mission is simple, yet critical: to bring together the best Christian law students from around the United States, train them in legal theory and practice, equip them with the professional skills and networks to thrive in the legal profession, and inspire them to reimagine their careers as a way of serving God.”

From 2011 to 2016, Amy Coney Barrett served on the faculty of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship lecturing its nifty little Christian trainees in constitutional law.  She has also been a long-time member of the arch-conservative Heritage Society, the organization to which Donald Trump turned for every single appointment he made to the federal bench not one of whom of course was a partisan hack.

The Blackstone Legal Fellowship has trained 1,900 Christian law students since its founding in 2000.  Its program lasts 9 weeks and consists of three phases:  Learn, Lead and Defend. 

The first two weeks are spent in the classroom studying ethics, theology and jurisprudence, because as we all know, under the Constitution, theology has so much to do with jurisprudence.  

Trainees spend the next six weeks as interns serving with “public-interest law firms, attorneys, law professors, think tanks, and public-policy organizations.”  The final week is spent at the headquarters of the Alliance Defending Freedom in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the trainees are introduced to elected representatives such as those famous non-partisan non-hacks Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio and meet with conservative members of the judiciary and practicing attorneys at conservative law firms.  To top off their nine-week incubation period as well-trained little right-wing legal robots, the fellows are given an orientation on how to work the Blackstone alumni network, which includes such notables as Amy Coney Barrett; former attorney general Edwin Meese, Mary Ann Glendon, former ambassador to the Vatican; and Andrew Sandlin, a Christian minister and the De Yong Distinguished Visiting Professor of Culture and Theology at Edinburg Theological Seminary in…wait for it…Pharr, Texas.

Let’s review.  Amy Coney Barrett made her legal career as a member of the arch-conservative Heritage Society and has not only been associated with but compensated by the arch-conservative Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which won the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court and has opposed the Supreme Court case in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same sex marriage and Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized sodomy.  The Alliance has also opposed gay adoptions, transgender rights, and sex education, among other political issues of interest to conservatives. 

But those aren’t partisan issues, and of course Amy Coney Barrett is not a partisan hack.

Good to know, isn’t it?  You can vote to end abortion in the state of Texas, spend five years of your life training conservative Christian lawyers to “reimagine their careers as a way of serving God,” and take arch-conservative positions on practically every culture war issue the Republican Party has spent the last 40 years running on, but politics?  Please.

This is the con the right-wing has been running for decades.  They pretend that all they are interested in is their favorite legal “philosophy” like “originalism” while they work assiduously behind the scenes to pack courts all over the nation with arch-conservative Christian judges and fill law firms with arch-conservative Christian lawyers who will work for arch-conservative legal foundations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, and then scream bloody murder if anyone accuses them of partisanship.

Amy Coney Barrett is not only a partisan hack, she is an arch-conservative fundamentalist Christian partisan hack.  Taking her by her own past associations, she has been put on the Supreme Court to serve God Almighty.  And until now, she hasn’t even bothered hiding it.

If Democrats don’t get it together to pack the court and reduce the power of these sneak-attack monsters like Amy Coney Barrett, we deserve every bad decision they make.