Amy Coney Barrett is pretending not to know every word of her dissent in the case Klobuchar is asking about (and Durbin asked before).
I say "pretending" because, at this level, these people know EVERY WORD they've written and likely to come up.
KLOBLUCHAR IS STICKING ACB TO THE POST ON THIS ONE.
By "at this level" I wasn't talking about Kavanaugh, who probably doesn't remember what he writes while black out drunk.
Yasss. We have Barrett on the record agreeing with SCALIA in his dissent in the ACA, but will suddenly NOT TAKE A POSITION on RBG in her dissent from Shelby county.
As a law nerd, I'm here for how @amyklobuchar is nailing Barrett on voting rights.
But for the non-legal people, there needs to be a turn to how this anti-voting justice is being SENT to hand the election that is already underway to Trump.
She's doing a bit of this turn now, talking about all the way people are having their votes suppressed RIGHT NOW.
Now she's doing a bunch of questions about how Republicans are going to steal the elections, and backing Barrett into a corner where all she can say is that she won't offer an opinion.
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Harris is now explaining Shelby County v Holder to Amy Coney Barrett who pretended to not know what the case was about.
OKAY, ACB is being intellectually dishonest about the holding. She's saying that the preclearance coverage formula was struck down, but "congress could pass a new formula." That's technically not a lie, but what she's not telling you...
is that Roberts struck down the preclearance formula in such a way as to make it unlikely that ANY preclearance formula could be legislated that would pass constitutional muster.
Welp, Josh Hawley actually just blew up Barrett's entire point.
Barrett argued that she couldn't give an answer on Griswold because it's an active controversy. But Hawley just had her admit to that there was no active litigation about Griswold for the past decades.
SO, WHICH ONE IS IT GOP?
Either Griswold is SETTLED and she can take a position on supporting it (if she did) OR it's a live issue and her views on whether WOMEN CAN GET BIRTH CONTROL is kind of important.
PICK A RULE, HAWLEY, but you can't have it both ways.
Honestly, if these hearings matter what @HawleyMO did was one of the DUMBEST things he could have done. I really hope one of @TheDemocrats picks up on this.
Barrett says that Griswold (the right to contraception) is "unlikely to go anywhere" and suggests that it would take a statute to take it away.
This answer is full of crap because HOBBY LOBBY HAPPENED which denied contraception to women working there.
She says Griswold involves substantive due process. That's a tell. You can defend Griswold under the right to privacy, if you believe it exists, WHICH AMY CONEY BARRETT DOESN'T
Again, this is an example of Barrett TAKING A POSITION ON A CASE, while saying that she's not.
What's weird about Grassley is that he's a person who believes in conservative legal principles in a way that exists *outside* of being a FedSoc schill. Like, he's from an era before the FedSoc completely captured the GOP and told them how to talk about the law.
It's not like Grassley *disagrees* with FedSoc. It's just that he comes to his beliefs a little differently than the FedSoc group think, and it shows in his presentation (of views I think are wrong)
It's hard to explain the daylight between a Grassley approach and a FedSoc one, but, it's a little about intellectual honesty (FedSoc purposely misleads people while Grassley really is that dumb, if you will).
And...
The other day, I remarked on how time feels like it's slowing down as we approach the election. I think I understand why:
It's natural for humans to plan ahead. We set markers for when we'll do things, and we notice when those markers get closer and closer. Time progresses.
But right now, at least for me, I can't plan past Nov 3rd. I have no idea what the world will look like. Literally, my calendar usually gets filled up with "engagements" at least a month out. But I have NOTHING in my calendar past 11/3, I'm not even trying to think past that.
So, that's temporally distorting. I have nothing to look forward to, nothing I can really plan to do. As the Oracle says in the Matrix, we can't see past the choices we don't understand. And so it feels like *infinite* time b/w now and 11/3, b/c I can't comprehend "after it" yet.