If Amy Coney Barrett means what she just said, she should resign from the Supreme Court right now

Why not put your money where your mouth is?

(AP)

While speaking at a lecture hosted by the University of Lousville’s McConnell Center, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed faux concern over the American public’s belief that the highest court in the country has become partisan. After she was introduced by the Republican Senate Minority Leader and proud partisan goblin Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — and no, even Veep writers couldn’t have made this mess up — Barrett said justices should be “hyper-vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too.” She went on to insist that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties” and that “to say the court’s reasoning is flawed is different from saying the court is acting in a partisan manner.”

If you can lobotimize yourself into forgetting that Barrett joined her fellow conservative judges in recently refusing to block the clearly unconstitutional 6-week abortion ban in Texas, and sidestep the rank hypocrisy oozing from the mouth of a woman who gladly accepted a nomination that went against the very promises Republicans made when they blocked then-President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination, perhaps you can take Barrett’s concern at face value. Maybe partisanship keeps this proud conservative judge up at night. Sure.

But if she is truly afraid of bipartisan hacks taking over the United States Supreme Court, then she should take the first step in rectifying the problem… and resign.

Barrett was nominated and later confirmed to the Supreme Court for one main reason and one main reason only: to overturn Roe v Wade. The president who nominated her, Donald Trump, said as much. During a 2016 presidential debate, Trump said “I will be appointing pro-life judges” and promised Roe v Wade would fall “automatically” after those judges were confirmed, especially if he was in a position to appoint two or three judges during his presidential tenure. And he was. Now, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Barrett herself sit on the high court, with the court’s partisanship on full display and Trump’s shameless promise fulfilled.

Barrett was an ideal nominee solely because of her personal beliefs — ones she shared often, openly, and with no shame. In 1998, she wrote an article for Notre Dame law school in which she described abortion as “always immoral,” and signed an anti-abortion ad in 2006 that called for “the end of the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade” as well as for the US to “restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” She has voted to rehear cases that previously found anti-abortion laws to be unconstitutional, including an Indiana law that required embryonic or fetal remains to be cremated or buried after an abortion. When she chose not to block the near-total abortion ban in Texas, she helped render Roe v Wade utterly useless for 1 in 10 American women.

Barrett’s so-called “worries” about a partisan-appearing court certainly didn’t stop her from celebrating an unparalleled nomination process in the midst of a deadly and ongoing pandemic, either. In 2016, Republican Senators blocked Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, arguing that the nomination was made too close to an upcoming presidential election — 293 days. “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy,’” McConnell said during a speech to supporters in 2016. Senator Lindsey Graham, McConnell’s bipartisan tomfoolery brother-in-arms, told his fellow Senators that very same year that he wanted them to “use my words against me,” promising that “if there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

Well, Graham is a liar, so of course that didn’t happen. Barrett was nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court just eight days before the 2020 presidential election. And for all her worry about bipartisanship, Barrett happily went along with the process, going so far as to attend a White House coronavirus super-spreader event celebrating her confirmation — the event that would later land Trump in the hospital with Covid-19.

If Barrett truly means what she says, then two things are true: First, she’s an uber-conservative, anti-abortion judge whose past comments absolutely show that she will vote to overturn Roe v Wade, therefore failing to uphold the United States Constitution (not to mention every pregnant person in the country) and providing reasonable cause for her impeachment and removal from the court. Second, she really is concerned about the partisanship of the Supreme Court, and therefore should remove herself from said court and rid it of the obvious Republican zealots that have tipped the court in one political party’s favor.

It’s time to put your money where your mouth is, Justice. Resign today, and tomorrow the Supreme Court of the United States of America will look a little less like that which you claim to fear.