Amy Barrett not that conservative


You know that everyone on both sides have their panties in a wad over this nomination when in fact if a Justice follows the law it really doesn't matter. Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have all voted the law and not their party.

First comes the Constitution's Law, then laws & statutes. If the latter do not support the Constitution, SCOTUS Justices should not vote for said statues & laws.
 
Amy Barrett not that conservative
There's a church lady on the bench. I can't help the impression that as a concerned mother and citizen and all that, she just doesn't want me to have a gun because she thinks I might hurt someone with it. Those double speaking judicial system participants don't want me to have a gun, but they can't make a reasonable claim that I'd hurt myself with it, and they aren't willing to come right out and call me a murderer without the DNA experts, and the whole kit and kaboodle, and somebody who actually died so they could frame me for it.
Many decisions favor government & corporations...
It all comes down to Gun Control at all costs. The Kennedys and Johnsons were staunch Catholics, too, weren't they? They preach against abortion, too, but they don't practice what they preach, and the faith they express is ineffectual without working to actually save babies and children from all the murder and mayhem in massa, or from being aborted before birth.

And Catholic Democrat Senator Joe Manchin doesn't see anything wrong with the foregoing.
 
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Amy Barrett not that conservative
There's a church lady on the bench. I can't help the impression that as a concerned mother and citizen and all that, she just doesn't want me to have a gun because she thinks I might hurt someone with it. Those double speaking judicial system participants don't want me to have a gun, but they can't make a reasonable claim that I'd hurt myself with it, and they aren't willing to come right out and call me a murderer without the DNA experts, and the whole kit and kaboodle, and somebody who actually died so they could frame me for it.
Many decisions favor government & corporations...
It all comes down to Gun Control at all costs. The Kennedys and Johnsons were staunch Catholics, too, weren't they? They preach against abortion, too, but they don't practice what they preach, and the faith they express is ineffectual without working to actually save babies and children from all the murder and mayhem in massa, or from being aborted before birth.

And Catholic Democrat Senator Joe Manchin doesn't see anything wrong with the foregoing.
The important thing is that she is a Constitutionalist. With her on the court, you will be able to have your guns,
 
The important thing is that she is a Constitutionalist. With her on the court, you will be able to have your guns,
I hope so, and I believe I have reason to think so — in any event Barrett's appointment should be a vast improvement over Ginsburg's.

At the same time, there are only nine judges on the Supreme Court, and the entire system is deviously arranged with a one-way "precedent setting" ratchet effect of judicial decisions that occurs in the liberal direction only, as each decision is progressively construed and re-construed by more extreme left-wing Socialist and Communist lower courts, and only those cases which obstruct leftist goals and objectives are ever permitted to come up to the Supreme Court for appeal, and only on such narrow grounds as will preserve leftist "progress" only, while denying appeal for conservative causes.
 
BIGOTS: ABC Pushes Vile Fake Claim Barrett Christian Group Inspired Handmaid’s Tale.
Beyond the usual leftist wailing about abortion, ABC’s Tom Llamas went on to push a vile assertion that he knew was fake:

Also under the microscope, Barrett’s link to a small charismatic Christian community called People of Praise….According to its website, “many of its members choose to make a lifetime commitment to the community – a covenant.” Members are assigned a personal adviser. Men were called “heads” and women were called “handmaids.” But those titles since changed to “leaders,” amid speculation the group may have inspired the novel and Emmy-award winning drama The Handmaid’s Tale.

After hyping the made-up smear, he then admitted that it wasn’t true: “But author Margaret Atwood saying that’s not accurate, telling ABC News there were several inspirations.”
Pence to ABC: Don’t repeat “intolerance” shown Barrett over her faith.

Why is the House of Stephanopoulos such a cesspit of anti-religious bigotry?

They hate Christians.
They hate Catholics.
They hate us.

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It looks like your view is infected with Consequentialism. If the law and constitution lead to her to her decision, she has done her job. That's how Originalism and Textualism work. If a law duly passed by the Legislature and signed by the Executive leads to an outcome that the Left favors than a Textualist is going to follow that trail to the conclusion that is supported by law. It's the Consequentialist that arrogantly overrules branches that stand for election.

All your claim does is demonstrate that she is jurist of integrity that does not substitute her preference for the proper application of the law.

Ed Whelan points out that in 2017, every Supreme Court law clerk who served the same term (October Term 1998) that Amy Coney Barrett clerked for Justice Scalia signed a letter supporting her nomination to the Seventh Circuit. The signatories hailed Barrett as a “woman of remarkable intellect and character,” as someone who “conducted herself with professionalism, grace, and integrity” and “was able to work collaboratively with her colleagues (even those with whom she disagreed) on challenging legal questions,” and as “smart, honorable, and fair-minded.”

The letter is noteworthy. It shows that Barrett has the intellect, character, professionalism, collegiality, and fair mindedness one wants in a Supreme Court Justice.

Barrett isn’t in step with the ideological preferences of some who signed the 2017 letter. But she is in step with President Trump’s views and, I think, with the views of a majority of current U.S. Senators views on textualism and originalism.
 
It looks like your view is infected with Consequentialism. If the law and constitution lead to her to her decision, she has done her job. That's how Originalism and Textualism work. If a law duly passed by the Legislature and signed by the Executive leads to an outcome that the Left favors than a Textualist is going to follow that trail to the conclusion that is supported by law. It's the Consequentialist that arrogantly overrules branches that stand for election.

All your claim does is demonstrate that she is jurist of integrity that does not substitute her preference for the proper application of the law.

Ed Whelan points out that in 2017, every Supreme Court law clerk who served the same term (October Term 1998) that Amy Coney Barrett clerked for Justice Scalia signed a letter supporting her nomination to the Seventh Circuit. The signatories hailed Barrett as a “woman of remarkable intellect and character,” as someone who “conducted herself with professionalism, grace, and integrity” and “was able to work collaboratively with her colleagues (even those with whom she disagreed) on challenging legal questions,” and as “smart, honorable, and fair-minded.”

The letter is noteworthy. It shows that Barrett has the intellect, character, professionalism, collegiality, and fair mindedness one wants in a Supreme Court Justice.

Barrett isn’t in step with the ideological preferences of some who signed the 2017 letter. But she is in step with President Trump’s views and, I think, with the views of a majority of current U.S. Senators views on textualism and originalism.

Hope you are right & I will be happy to be wrong!
 
It looks like your view is infected with Consequentialism. If the law and constitution lead to her to her decision, she has done her job. That's how Originalism and Textualism work. If a law duly passed by the Legislature and signed by the Executive leads to an outcome that the Left favors than a Textualist is going to follow that trail to the conclusion that is supported by law. It's the Consequentialist that arrogantly overrules branches that stand for election.

All your claim does is demonstrate that she is jurist of integrity that does not substitute her preference for the proper application of the law.

Ed Whelan points out that in 2017, every Supreme Court law clerk who served the same term (October Term 1998) that Amy Coney Barrett clerked for Justice Scalia signed a letter supporting her nomination to the Seventh Circuit. The signatories hailed Barrett as a “woman of remarkable intellect and character,” as someone who “conducted herself with professionalism, grace, and integrity” and “was able to work collaboratively with her colleagues (even those with whom she disagreed) on challenging legal questions,” and as “smart, honorable, and fair-minded.”

The letter is noteworthy. It shows that Barrett has the intellect, character, professionalism, collegiality, and fair mindedness one wants in a Supreme Court Justice.

Barrett isn’t in step with the ideological preferences of some who signed the 2017 letter. But she is in step with President Trump’s views and, I think, with the views of a majority of current U.S. Senators views on textualism and originalism.
Hope you are right & I will be happy to be wrong!
Thanks.

Gorsuch wrote a book where he covers this, called A Republic If You Can Keep It. It's very current, he talks about cases he help decide last term and he goes over the deeper meaning of a Textualism/Originalism. It's a process of applying past facts to black letter law and it in no sense means that you will always come to a politically conservative decision. In fact, he is quite clear that there will be times that it leads to a decision that you personally don't like, but, as a judge, you are not a legislator, and if that is how the law is written, you don't re-write it, you apply it as written.

In fact, if we as a society back up a little, one of the challenges we are having in our system of self-governance is that the legislature is doing very sloppy work. They write sloppy laws that do not lead to clear interpretation, and the Court corrects their work. We would be better served if Judges threw their sloppy work back into their laps as too opaque to rule on, and gave them an opportunity to state their purposes more clearly.

I like the idea of ACB, and she has the advantage of having just been approved by the Senate two years ago, and this needs to be a fairly rapid confirmation, but, Trump may throw a change up.
 
[...]
In fact, if we as a society back up a little, one of the challenges we are having in our system of self-governance is that the legislature is doing very sloppy work. They write sloppy laws that do not lead to clear interpretation, and the Court corrects their work. We would be better served if Judges threw their sloppy work back into their laps as too opaque to rule on, and gave them an opportunity to state their purposes more clearly.
[...]

Worse than sloppy is their laziness in ceding their Constitutional duty & power to the administrative agencies which are part of the Executive branch.
 
[...]
In fact, if we as a society back up a little, one of the challenges we are having in our system of self-governance is that the legislature is doing very sloppy work. They write sloppy laws that do not lead to clear interpretation, and the Court corrects their work. We would be better served if Judges threw their sloppy work back into their laps as too opaque to rule on, and gave them an opportunity to state their purposes more clearly.
[...]

Worse than sloppy is their laziness in ceding their Constitutional duty & power to the administrative agencies which are part of the Executive branch.
Yes! Gorsuch covers this as well. Our law making process is slow, ponderous and requires broad national agreement. It takes a majority of 435 congressmen, drawn from roughly counties from throughout the country. No one region is enough enough to get a law passed. Then it must be agreeable to a majority of a hundred senators, drawn from fifty states, and then the President needs to sign it. 487 people, from throughout the nation, must agree in order for a law to approved that restricts our conduct, and it's meant to be difficult, because we are a free people, and in order for our will to be restricted by federal law, there needs to be broad agreement.

Now our executive branch is made to able to respond in a rapid manner to an emergency. So all the things that slow down the legislature are not in place to slow down the executive branch, which can rapidly make and implement decisions. Well, someone figured out, about 80 years ago, that if Congress grants its law making authority to the Executive Branch that they can spit out laws like a machine gun. These agencies have grown to massive size and they spit out regulation like a popcorn machine to the point that the average person who wants to organize their lives in a law abiding manner faces a bewildering array of laws, rules and regulations.

One time a conservative law maker, I believe it was Rand Paul, asked the Congressional Research Service to count up how many regulations, with felony penalties, were currently in force from all the executive agencies. The CRS replied that they were too numerous to count. Now if they can't even be counted, how in the world can we be presumed to be knowledgeable about them in order to comply with them?

Scalia was beginning to speak out against the long term legal standard of presumption of knowledge of the law, as there are just far to many of them to presume knowledge, but, he left us too soon and this work awaits others to develop further. In Gorsuch's book, he throws the subject on the table, but doesn't really solve it, other than to speak to the challenges of the chevron defense, the caselaw that states that the Court will presume the rightness of the agencies interpretation that their regulations are consistent with the legislature's enabling legislation.

There has been certainly been interest on the Conservative side of revisiting this, but, Roberts is a tough read and because of the uncertainty of how Roberts will handle anything, they have been passing on questions that they might otherwise examine. I hope whoever the nominee is, that they are asked about their view of the Chevron Defense.


Amy-Coney-Barrett-University-of-Notre-Dame-cropped
SECOND AMENDMENT
Amy Coney Barrett Thinks the Second Amendment Prohibits Blanket Bans on Gun Possession by People With Felony Records

The SCOTUS contender's 2019 dissent will alarm gun control supporters but reassure people who want judges to take this constitutional provision as seriously as others.
 
[...]
In fact, if we as a society back up a little, one of the challenges we are having in our system of self-governance is that the legislature is doing very sloppy work. They write sloppy laws that do not lead to clear interpretation, and the Court corrects their work. We would be better served if Judges threw their sloppy work back into their laps as too opaque to rule on, and gave them an opportunity to state their purposes more clearly.
[...]

Worse than sloppy is their laziness in ceding their Constitutional duty & power to the administrative agencies which are part of the Executive branch.
Yes! Gorsuch covers this as well. Our law making process is slow, ponderous and requires broad national agreement. It takes a majority of 435 congressmen, drawn from roughly counties from throughout the country. No one region is enough enough to get a law passed. Then it must be agreeable to a majority of a hundred senators, drawn from fifty states, and then the President needs to sign it. 487 people, from throughout the nation, must agree in order for a law to approved that restricts our conduct, and it's meant to be difficult, because we are a free people, and in order for our will to be restricted by federal law, there needs to be broad agreement.

Now our executive branch is made to able to respond in a rapid manner to an emergency. So all the things that slow down the legislature are not in place to slow down the executive branch, which can rapidly make and implement decisions. Well, someone figured out, about 80 years ago, that if Congress grants its law making authority to the Executive Branch that they can spit out laws like a machine gun. These agencies have grown to massive size and they spit out regulation like a popcorn machine to the point that the average person who wants to organize their lives in a law abiding manner faces a bewildering array of laws, rules and regulations.

One time a conservative law maker, I believe it was Rand Paul, asked the Congressional Research Service to count up how many regulations, with felony penalties, were currently in force from all the executive agencies. The CRS replied that they were too numerous to count. Now if they can't even be counted, how in the world can we be presumed to be knowledgeable about them in order to comply with them?

Scalia was beginning to speak out against the long term legal standard of presumption of knowledge of the law, as there are just far to many of them to presume knowledge, but, he left us too soon and this work awaits others to develop further. In Gorsuch's book, he throws the subject on the table, but doesn't really solve it, other than to speak to the challenges of the chevron defense, the caselaw that states that the Court will presume the rightness of the agencies interpretation that their regulations are consistent with the legislature's enabling legislation.

There has been certainly been interest on the Conservative side of revisiting this, but, Roberts is a tough read and because of the uncertainty of how Roberts will handle anything, they have been passing on questions that they might otherwise examine. I hope whoever the nominee is, that they are asked about their view of the Chevron Defense.


Amy-Coney-Barrett-University-of-Notre-Dame-cropped
SECOND AMENDMENT
Amy Coney Barrett Thinks the Second Amendment Prohibits Blanket Bans on Gun Possession by People With Felony Records

The SCOTUS contender's 2019 dissent will alarm gun control supporters but reassure people who want judges to take this constitutional provision as seriously as others.
Her deep dive is pretty sound. The facts of the case.

Rickey Kanter, who owned a Wisconsin company that sold therapeutic shoes and footwear inserts under the brand name Dr. Comfort, pleaded guilty in 2011 to one count of mail fraud for shipping inserts he falsely claimed were approved by Medicare. His felony conviction meant that he permanently lost the constitutional right to possess firearms.​

Her Finding:

That categorical ban on gun ownership by people with felony records, a feature of both Wisconsin and federal law, cannot be reconciled with the Second Amendment, Amy Coney Barrett concluded in a 37-page dissent from a 2019 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. Barrett's thorough and scholarly opinion marks her as a judge committed to applying constitutional provisions in light of their historical background and original public meaning.​
History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous. Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons. Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun. In 1791—and for well more than a century afterward—legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety.​
The government presented no evidence that his particular crime or any other personal characteristics showed he had violent tendencies that posed a threat to public safety.

Given the poor fit between the ban's scope and its ostensible purpose, Barrett said, it is not "substantially related to an important government interest"—the test under the "intermediate scrutiny" that the majority said it was applying in this case. "Neither Wisconsin nor the United States has introduced data sufficient to show that disarming all nonviolent felons substantially advances its interest in keeping the public safe," she wrote. "Nor have they otherwise demonstrated that Kanter himself shows a proclivity for violence. Absent evidence that he either belongs to a dangerous category or bears individual markers of risk, permanently disqualifying Kanter from possessing a gun violates the Second Amendment."

"While both Wisconsin and the United States have an unquestionably strong interest in protecting the public from gun violence, they have failed to show, by either logic or data, that disarming Kanter substantially advances that interest," she wrote. "On this record, holding that the ban is constitutional as applied to Kanter does not 'put[] the government through its paces,' but instead treats the Second Amendment as a 'second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.'"

 
We won't like all of her decisions.

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Conservative Libertarians who hope to see the federal courts pay greater heed to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment are likely to be troubled Barrett on judicial deference and economic liberty.

In 1938 the Supreme Court concocted a bifurcated approach to judicial review that treats some constitutional rights as more equal than others. If a law or regulation infringes on a right that the Court has deemed fundamental (such as freedom of speech or the right to vote), the Court said in United States v. Carolene Products Co., the judiciary should presume that law or regulation to be unconstitutional and subject it to "more exacting judicial scrutiny." By contrast, in cases dealing with "regulatory legislation affecting ordinary commercial transactions," Carolene Products stated, "the existence of facts supporting the legislative judgment is to be presumed." In other words, judges are supposed to tip the scales in favor of lawmakers when economic liberty might be at stake.

Now known as the rational-basis test, this rubber stamp approach has led to some truly dreadful judgments. Take Goesaert v. Cleary (1948), in which the Supreme Court upheld a Michigan law forbidding women from working as bartenders unless they were "the wife or daughter of the male owner." Valentine Goesaert, who owned a bar in Dearborn, fought for her right to tend bar in her own establishment. She lost thanks to rational-basis deference.

"We cannot cross-examine either actually or argumentatively the mind of Michigan legislators nor question their motives," declared Justice Felix Frankfurter. "Since the line they have drawn is not without a basis in reason," he wrote, invoking the rational-basis test, "we cannot give ear to the suggestion that the real impulse behind this legislation was an unchivalrous desire of male bartenders to try to monopolize the calling." Needless to say, the ban on female bartenders served no legitimate public health or safety purpose.

Rational-basis deference was also at the center of the federal district court ruling in Niang v. Carroll (2016). At issue was a Missouri law that made it a crime to offer African-style hair braiding services without a cosmetology license. That slip of government paper did not come cheap. In addition to paying thousands of dollars in fees, would-be African-style hair braiders had to complete over 1,500 hours of state-sanctioned education. What is worse, none of Missouri's licensed cosmetology schools actually offered any training in African-style hair braiding. Once again, the regulation at issue served no legitimate public health or safety purpose.

But none of that mattered to Judge John M. Bodenhausen of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who let the preposterous law stand. "This case," Bodenhausen declared, "illustrates the great deference that federal courts must show to government regulations under the rational basis standard."

Amy Coney Barrett has written in defense of the rational-basis standard. "Highly deferential judicial review reflects the judgment that a more searching inquiry would pull judges into terrain they are not good at navigating," Barrett wrote in a 2017 article for Constitutional Commentary. "The current, deferential regime reflects humility about the capacity of judges to evaluate the soundness of scientific and economic claims." According to Barrett, "deferential judicial review of run-of-the-mill legislation" is defensible on the grounds that such judicial deference "is consistent with the reality that the harm inflicted by the Supreme Court's erroneous interference in the democratic process is harder to remedy than the harm inflicted by an ill-advised statute."

The late Antonin Scalia defended judicial deference in similar terms, arguing in a 1984 speech that "the position the Supreme Court has arrived at is good—or at least that the suggestion that it change its position is even worse." According to Scalia, the best approach in economic cases was for the courts to adopt an across-the-board stance of judicial pacifism. "In the long run, and perhaps even in the short run," Scalia maintained, "the reinforcement of mistaken and unconstitutional perceptions of the role of the courts in our system far outweighs whatever evils may have accrued from undue judicial abstention in the economic field."

The problem with the Scalia-Barrett view is that it runs counter to the text and history of the 14th Amendment, which was written, ratified, and originally understood to protect (among other rights) the right to economic liberty. In the words of Rep. John Bingham (R), the Ohio congressman who served as the principal author of Section One of the 14th Amendment in 1866, "the provisions of the Constitution guaranteeing rights, privileges, and immunities" includes "the constitutional liberty…to work in an honest calling and contribute by your toil in some sort to the support of yourself, to the support of your fellow men, and to be secure in the enjoyment of the fruits of your toil."

Put differently, if the federal courts had followed the 14th Amendment—rather than the judicially invented rational-basis test—then a bar owner's right to tend bar in her own establishment and an African-style hair braider's right to earn a living would have been rightfully secured against arbitrary and unnecessary government interference.

I hope that someone on the Senate Judiciary Committee will ask ACB whether she thinks that rational-basis deference can be reconciled with the original meaning of the 14th Amendment.


But hells bells, we never get smart question like that as these hearings! We'll a bunch of idiots shrieking about something stupid, rather than solid questions of judicial doctrine.
 
We love some of her decisions.

What did Professor Amy Coney Barrett say about NFIB v. Sebelius?

When Joe Biden, who still is refusing to submit a drug test, pokes his head out of his basement he squawks nonsense about Healthcare. Here is what ACB actually said on the case:

She did not repeat the shibboleth that the Chief upheld the mandate as a tax. He construed the penalty as a tax, and that decision allowed him to uphold the statute (Section 5000A).

Is the pending challenge in California v. Texas she is under no duty to recuse. Texas has not asked the Court to reverse, or reconsider NFIB.

https://reason.com/2020/09/26/what-...er than having an unelected judge rewrite it.
 
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She is correct in her judgment of that law. The cost was never meant to be a tax. Never written into law as a tax. It was just a hail Mary pitch by the attorney arguing the case.
 

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