Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has tweeted that, “I will not participate in the degradation of our democracy or our judiciary, or in confirming a judge so clearly unfit for the Supreme Court.”
I will not participate in the degradation of our democracy or our judiciary, or in confirming a judge so clearly unfit for the Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/L3T8dgLPWE
— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) September 28, 2020
No one has ever thought that Gillibrand was the sharpest knife in the Senate drawer (remember her recent run for the Democratic presidential nomination? Neither does anyone else). But if she means what she actually said, “I will not participate . . . in confirming a judge . . .” then I guess she intends not to vote on the confirmation, which would be fine with me.
But how is Judge Amy Coney Barrett “so clearly unfit for the Supreme Court”? She graduated from college magna cum laude and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She received a full-scholarship to Notre Dame law school where she graduated first in her class, summa cum laude. She was an executive editor on the law review. She clerked for both the vastly distinguished Leonard Silberman, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and for Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
She has worked in private practice and served as a full professor of law at Notre Dame, where she held an endowed chair. Her legal scholarship has been published in many top-rated law reviews, such as Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame, and Texas Law Reviews.
Since 2017, she has been a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (while continuing to teach at Notre Dame). She has written more than 100 opinions and dissents while serving on the court. Her nomination to the court was supported by “every law clerk she had worked with and all of her 49 faculty colleagues at Notre Dame Law school. 450 former students signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting her nomination.” By no means were all of them conservatives, but they all agreed that she possesses an extraordinary legal mind and the collegiality needed to be successful on an appeals court.
So how is she “clearly unfit for the Supreme Court”? Because she agrees with the legal philosophy of Justice Scalia? Well, he was confirmed by a vote of 98-0 (including then Senator Joe Biden, who came to regret his vote, “because he was so effective.”
I guess in Senator Gillibrand’s view, only those willing to legislate from the bench when Congress doesn’t have the votes to act itself to advance liberal causes are “fit” to serve on the Supreme Court. Has anyone else noticed how utterly intellectually bankrupt that is?
Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School and by no means a conservative who clerked for the Supreme Court the same year Barrett did, has a different opinion.