This article appeared as a letter to the editor in the October 12 edition of The Advocate newspaper.
It doesn’t take a political scientist to see hypocrisy in the GOP’s decision to press forward in appointing President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. In 2016, Judge Merrick Garland went over nine months without getting a hearing from the Republican-held Senate. Barrett’s nomination comes a mere 38 days before Election Day.
The Senate was led then and is now by majority leader Mitch McConnell. However, if the cards were flipped, with equally opposite situations in both 2016 and 2020, we’d see the same scenario play out. That’s politics.
True hypocrisy will come when Barrett’s confirmation hearings began Oct. 12. The Democratic Party and its senators, who claim to be a party of acceptance and progressivism, will deride Barrett on a fundamental, personal level, because she espouses differing political views. The party’s underlying anti-Catholic sentiment will materialize in ways only been hinted at before.
In now-federal Judge Brian Buescher’s 2018 Senate hearings, Sen. Kamala Harris attacked Buescher because of his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization that is known worldwide for its charity. As a Catholic and member of that organization, these comments are appalling but not surprising. In Barrett’s 2017 Senate hearing for a federal judgeship, Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Barrett, “The dogma lives loudly within you,” as a condemnation of her Catholic views.
Anti-Catholic bigotry is only part of it. Forget celebrating Barrett’s nomination to possibly serve as just the fifth woman in the history of the Supreme Court. Instead, she will be chastised in ways that reveal the Democratic Party to be pro-woman only if you have a “D” behind your name. Or only if you believe that abortion is a human right — no irony there?
Democrats will wage a hit job on Barrett because of her nomination’s strength. She is 48 with seven kids and might sit on the highest court in the land just 23 years after graduating first in her class at Notre Dame Law. She chose to keep her youngest biological child after he was diagnosed with Down syndrome during prenatal screening.
Of Barrett’s children, two are adopted from Haiti, one adopted after the 2010 earthquake. A Boston University professor is under fire for labeling Barrett a “white colonizer” for adopting these two children. Benevolence and charity are dead in the Democratic Party.
Aside from the coming hearings, the vote on Barrett will serve as a referendum on whether religious freedom and Catholicism are still acceptable in this country’s mainstream.
More than likely, every Democrat in the Senate, some of them Catholic, will vote to reject Barrett’s nomination. That is their prerogative. They are playing a losing game.
MASON SCIONEAUX
college student
Vacherie