Amy Coney Barrett and Her Democrat Opponents

As confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett approach it seems that her Democratic opponents have decided not to try to attack her personally - although there've been simple-minded outliers, who've called her a racist, strangely enough, because she and her husband have adopted two Haitian children. But so far she's mostly been spared the sort of treatment meted out by Democrats to past judicial nominees like Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.

Her democratic foes have apparently decided to concentrate their attacks instead on the probable results of seating a Justice who believes that her decisions should be based on what the Constitution says and not on whatever happens to be progressive dogma on any given day.

The editors at The Washington Free Beacon write that,

Barrett is too squeaky clean for their [the Democrats] usual tactics to work. Democrats have instead gone to plan B, making clear what they've worked to obscure for the past three decades in previous attempts to derail Republican judicial nominations. If they can't attack Barrett's qualifications for the Court, they'll explicitly attack the political consequences of her nomination.

The Free Beacon article gives a short recitation of the sorts of attacks that have been employed against conservative nominees in the past, but beyond that, there's a very important issue at stake being raised here, one that has gone largely unremarked by our media: What should the role of a Supreme Court Justice actually be? Should Justices decide cases according to their personal political beliefs or should they decide them according to what the Constitution allows?

The opposition to Barrett stems entirely from a belief by her opponents that it should be the former. They want a Court which would in essence be a legislature that would circumvent Congress and impose their political views on the rest of us. That's what's behind the threats to "pack the court," i.e. add two more progressive justices to the Supreme Court, if they regain the White House and the Senate.

The Free Beacon editors add that,

This time around, the smears aren't sticking. Instead, Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud: At last week's presidential debate, Biden said he opposed Barrett not because of her qualifications but because she would hasten the overturn of Obamacare, [which is] once again before the Court in November, and because she would be a fifth or sixth vote against Roe.

Senate Democrats have followed suit. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) has refused to even meet with Barrett because he thinks she will "decimate health care," while Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) objected explicitly to Barrett's "closely held views that will impact a woman's right to choose."

These objections are completely wrong-headed. If those laws, or certain features of them, conflict with the Constitution then they should be overturned and sent back to the legislature for revision, and if they're not in conflict with the Constitution they should be allowed to stand.

To argue otherwise is to argue that the Court, an unelected body with lifetime tenure, should legislate rather than adjudicate, that the Justices should make law instead of interpreting it in light of the Constitution.

As the editors conclude,

Biden and his Senate colleagues are finally admitting what we've always known: They see the Supreme Court as just another venue for progressive rule and fear a judge who won't legislate from the bench. Claims about fitness and character were always a pretext for political ends.

Barrett is extremely well-qualified as even many of her opponents concede. The only question that remains, or should remain, is whether her decisions will be in keeping with what the Founders stated in the Constitution of the United States and its subsequent amendments.

The problem is that this is the last thing the left wants. A Court whose majority hews to a judicial philosophy which includes an intense fealty to the Constitution would stop in its tracks the progressive ambition to "fundamentally transform" this country, as candidate Barack Obama put it in 2008.