Remember Leftists Calling Trump Sexist? Two Women Just Made His Short List for SCOTUS Pick
Donald Trump, the inveterate sexist. Donald Trump and his war on women. Donald Trump, who treats the distaff gender like garbage. Donald Trump, the man who has whittled his Supreme Court choices down to three men and two women, and the favorite is a woman.
One one of these things is not like the other. And, it just so happens it’s not the one that’s been endlessly passed through the media’s Trump filter.
According to remarks made aboard Air Force One on Friday, President Trump will make his Supreme Court pick to replace retiring Justice Athony Kennedy on July 9. He didn’t reveal any names, but he did reveal some basics about where he is in the process.
“I’ve got it narrowed to about five,” the president said, according to CNN.
Trump said the list included two women. He added that he was going to be interviewing several of the candidates in New Jersey this weekend.
As for their stance on Roe v. Wade, which everyone on the left seems to have gone apoplectic about? “I’m not going to ask them that question,” the president said.
Not only are there two women in the running at this stage, but the clear favorite — if media attention is any indicator — is Amy Coney Barrett, a recent Trump addition to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia.
According to the Washington Examiner, Barrett is only 46 years old, meaning she’d likely be on the high court well past 2040.
There would also be a shrewd tactical element to nominating Barrett. When she was appointed to the 7th Circuit Court in 2017, her Catholicism engendered fanatical responses from the left, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s unintentionally hilarious Yoda-esque line, “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”
That poses an interesting conundrum for Democrats: Either go after her on her religious beliefs to satisfy their increasingly secular base or avoid a losing argument about religious freedom that would likely cost them several swing races.
That’s the last thing that Chuck Schumer wants, particularly as he he doesn’t want to put swing seats at risk in heavily Catholic states like California, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin.
In particular, California is seen as crucial to recapturing the House for Democrats, and alienating Catholics statewide probably isn’t a superb strategy as these things go. Social conservatives, meanwhile, would be rallied to the polls in what was supposed to be an off year for the GOP.
Writing at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty said that a Barrett candidacy would provide “edifying political lessons.”
“The facts of Barrett’s life — that she is a mother of seven children, and that when she speaks about her Catholic faith, she speaks about God as if she really believes in His existence — will provoke nasty and bigoted statements from Democratic senators and liberal media personalities. Again.”
As for the infamous “the dogma lives loudly within you” quote, Dougherty pointed out the obvious: “The bizarre idiom she created was a sign that Feinstein didn’t have an easy way to say what she wanted to say: A Catholic is fine. A believing Catholic is not.”
Beyond that, Barrett is an eminently qualified judge, and it would put Democrats in the unique position of having to excoriate a woman on national TV — something the party faithful might swallow, but wouldn’t go over well with an American public at large, who’ve been told for too many years that Democrats are the party protecting women. Tactical decisions aside, however, it will be interesting to see how the sexist angle is worked in by the national press.
Make no mistake — it will be in there. But if Barnett another woman is the nominee (6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Joan Larsen, another former Scalia clerk, is also being mentioned, according to CNN), liberals will have other problems to try to explain away.
Nominating a woman to the highest court in the land, after all, doesn’t seem like something an inveterate sexist would do.
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