Amy Coney Barrett

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      Trump assaulted American democracy – here's how Democrats can save it | Robert Reich

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      Barring a miracle, Amy Coney Barrett will be confirmed on Monday as the ninth justice on the US supreme court.
      This is a travesty of democracy.
      The vote on Barrett’s confirmation will occur just eight days before election day. By contrast, the Senate didn’t even hold a hearing on Merrick Garland, who Barack Obama nominated almost a year before the end of his term. Majority leader Mitch McConnell argued at the time that any vote should wait “until we have a new president”.
      Barrett was nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots, and who was impeached by the House of Representatives. When Barrett joins the court, five of the nine justices will have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.
      The Republican senators who will vote for her represent 15 million fewer Americans than their Democratic colleagues.
      Once on the high court, Barrett will join five other reactionaries who together will be able to declare laws unconstitutional, for perhaps a generation.
      Barrett’s confirmation is the culmination of years in which a shrinking and increasingly conservative, rural and white segment of the US population has been imposing its will on the rest of America. They’ve been bankrolled by big business, seeking lower taxes and fewer regulations.
      In the event Joe Biden becomes president on 20 January and both houses of Congress come under control of the Democrats, they can reverse this trend. It may be the last chance – both for the Democrats and, more importantly, for American democracy.
      How?
      For starters, increase the size of the supreme court. The constitution says nothing about the number of justices. The court changed size seven times in its first 80 years, from as few as five justices under John Adams to 10 under Abraham Lincoln.
      Biden says if elected he’ll create a bipartisan commission to study a possible court overhaul “because it’s getting out of whack”. That’s fine, but he’ll need to move quickly. The window of opportunity could close by the 2022 midterm elections.
      Second, abolish the Senate filibuster. Under current rules, 60 votes are needed to enact legislation. This means that if Democrats win a bare majority there, Republicans could block any new legislation Biden hopes to pass.
      The filibuster could be ended with a rule change requiring 51 votes. There is growing support among Democrats for doing this if they gain that many seats. During the campaign, Biden acknowledged that the filibuster has become a negative force in government.
      The filibuster is not in the constitution either.
      The most ambitious structural reform would be to rebalance the Senate itself. For decades, rural states have been emptying as the US population has shifted to vast megalopolises. The result is a growing disparity in representation, especially of nonwhite voters.
      For example, both California, with a population of 40 million, and Wyoming, whose population is 579,000, get two senators. If population trends continue, by 2040 some 40% of Americans will live in just five states, and half of America will be represented by 18 Senators, the other half by 82.
      This distortion also skews the electoral college, because each state’s number of electors equals its total of senators and representatives. Hence, the recent presidents who have lost the popular vote.
      This growing imbalance can be remedied by creating more states representing a larger majority of Americans. At the least, statehood should be granted to Washington DC. And given that one out of eight Americans now lives in California – whose economy, if it were a separate country, would be the ninth-largest in the world – why not split it into a North and South California?
      The constitution is also silent on the number of states.
      Those who recoil from structural reforms such as the three I’ve outlined warn that Republicans will retaliate when they return to power. That’s rubbish. Republicans have already altered the ground rules. In 2016, they failed to win a majority of votes cast for the House, Senate or the presidency, yet secured control of all three.
      Barrett’s ascent is the latest illustration of how grotesque the power imbalance has become, and how it continues to entrench itself ever more deeply. If not reversed soon, it will be impossible to remedy.
      What’s at stake is not partisan politics. It is representative government. If Democrats get the opportunity, they must redress this growing imbalance – for the sake of democracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US More

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      Democrats refuse to participate as Amy Coney Barrett nomination advanced – video

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      Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court nomination was advanced by a unilateral Republican vote to the full Senate despite Democrats’ refusal to participate in the Senate judiciary committee hearing for what they called a ‘naked power grab’.
      Democratic senators stood outside the Capital and boycotted the vote to install Donald Trump’s third supreme court nominee less than two weeks before the election.
      No supreme court nominee has ever been installed so close to a presidential election and, just four years ago, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and senator Lindsey Graham, who now chairs the judiciary committee, said that installing a nominee in an election year would be a shameful defiance of the will of voters
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      Senate judiciary committee approves Amy Coney Barrett as Democrats boycott – live More

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      Senate judiciary committee votes to advance Amy Coney Barrett nomination

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      Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee voted unilaterally Thursday to advance Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court nomination to the full Senate despite Democrats’ refusal to sit in the hearing room for what they called a naked “power grab”.
      Democratic senators had announced the night before that they would not participate in any move to install Donald Trump’s third supreme court nominee even as tens of millions of Americans vote in a presidential election less than two weeks away.
      No supreme court nominee has ever been installed so close to a presidential election, and just four years ago the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and Senator Lindsey Graham, who now chairs the judiciary committee, said that installing such a nominee in an election year would be a shameful defiance of the will of voters.
      Those qualms were nowhere in evidence on Thursday as Republicans, who hold a majority in the Senate and thus on every committee, met with themselves to send Barrett toward a seat vacated with the death last month of liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
      “My Democratic Senate colleagues and I boycotted the supreme court nominee committee vote today,” Democratic vice-presidential nominee and California senator Kamala Harris tweeted. “Let’s be clear: this nomination process is a sham and shows how Republicans will stop at nothing to strip health care from millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.”
      Senators plan to convene a rare weekend session for procedural actions ahead of a final confirmation vote expected Monday. McConnell has said he has the votes to confirm Barrett, whose arrival on the court would create an unassailable 6-3 conservative majority.
      “Barrett deserves to be on the supreme court and she will be confirmed,” said Graham. Democrats, he said, “made a choice not to participate”.
      Democratic senators on the committee spoke outside the Capitol later Thursday morning about what they said was a broken process demanded by a corrupt president and engineered by a Republican majority that had lost its way in a desperate attempt to hold onto power despite dwindling popular support.
      “We are descending into the low ground, the quicksand of a power grab, that will go down in history as one of the darker days of this institution,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said.
      In their committee room seats, Democrats arranged for posters to be placed of constituents they said had been helped by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which they fear Barrett, 48, could help throw out in a case that begins oral arguments next month, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
      Barrett is a conservative whose anti-abortion views and ties to groups that have publicly opposed same-sex marriage raised alarm among progressives, as well as her unwillingness to comment on the legality of voter intimidation or to promise to recuse herself from any case arising from the coming election.

      Nan Aron, president of the progressive Alliance for Justice group, said Republicans had conducted “theater”, as opposed to a real hearing.
      “Senate Republicans believe ‘advice and consent’ means performing the theatre of a hearing without scrutinizing the nominee in the least,” Aron said in a statement. “Amy Coney Barrett refused to answer the most fundamental questions about our democracy and human rights. Today’s vote shows Senate Republicans are already confident that she will advance their agenda.”
      But Jeanne Mancini, president of the anti-abortion group March for Life, praised Barrett and compared her favorably to Ginsburg.
      “Like her predecessor, Amy Coney Barrett is a trailblazer who is a role model for Americans,” Mancini said in a statement. “Her immense respect for the law and constitution will allow her to fairly apply the law and consider the rights of everyone who comes before her, including the unborn.”
      Trump is on track to becoming the first president in decades to appoint three supreme court justices in just one term, and he has shattered records for the speed with which he has remade the judiciary, installing more than 200 federal judges with McConnell’s help.
      Previous Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh joined the supreme court in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
      In her confirmation hearings, Barrett declined to say how she would rule in potential future challenges to the landmark Roe v Wade decision in 1973 that made abortion legal in the US, or other landmark reproductive rights cases.
      But progressives and mainstream legal analysts said her views on those and other issues appeared to be extreme, and they expressed concern that she could participate in the dismantling of environmental regulations, voting rights law, anti-discrimination protections, protections for immigrants and other essential safeguards.
      “It is an irresponsible and undemocratic abuse of power to see the Republican Senate leadership on the judiciary committee rush to fill Justice Ruth Ginsburg’s seat in the middle of an election and instead of providing coronavirus relief for the millions of families harmed by the pandemic and the economic crisis,” said Tina Tchen, president of the anti-sexual harassment group Time’s Up Now.
      “This sham process is preventing the American public from understanding how her extreme views are out of step with our constitutional values and principles.” More

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      Buttigieg to Fox News Sunday: Barrett nomination puts my marriage in danger

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      Pete Buttigieg, a former challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination and a member of Joe Biden’s transition team, believes his own marriage is under threat from Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Buttigieg, who married his husband Chasten in 2018, indicated that the court’s 2015 decision that made same-sex marriage legal was among a number of rulings a strong conservative majority could look to overturn.Republicans are seeking to seat Barrett before the 3 November general election. The Senate judiciary committee will vote this week on forwarding the nomination to a full floor vote.“Right now as we speak the pre-existing condition [healthcare] coverage of millions of Americans might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice,” Buttigieg said.“My marriage might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice. So many issues are on the line.”The right to same-sex marriage were enshrined in Obergefell v Hodges, the culmination of a years-long fight incorporating challenges from several states and decided by the landmark 5-4 ruling.Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said Republicans pushing through Barrett’s nomination days before the election, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, sent the wrong message to voters.“It’s not in the spirit of our constitution, or our legal system, or political system for them to do this,” he said. “Most Americans believe that the American people ought to have a say. We’re not talking about an election that’s coming up, we’re in the middle of an election, millions of Americans are voting and want their voice to be heard.”He added: “There’s an enormous amount of frustration that this Senate can’t even bring itself, with Mitch McConnell, to vote through a Covid relief package. People are suffering, people are hurting, there’s no clear end in sight.“There’s been a bill we brought to them months ago coming out of the house, they won’t touch it, they won’t do anything but suddenly they have time to rush through a nomination that the American people don’t want.“Whatever specific word you use for it, wrong is the word I would use.”Buttigieg defended himself against a claim from Wallace that he had talked about expanding the court to 15 justices, so-called court packing.“My views haven’t changed,” he said. “Bipartisan reform with the purpose of reducing the politicisation of the supreme court is a really promising idea. Let’s also be clear that a president can’t just snap their fingers and do it.” More