[AE.Politics] On Amy Coney Barrett and the political theater of the absurd
There's a lot of chatter on Twitter today about Amy Coney Barrett's recent remarks on the Supreme Court and partisanship.
Most of the headlines I've seen run something along the line of this one from Yahoo! News: "Barrett concerned about public perception of Supreme Court".
The Louisville Courier-Journal, which covered the event directly, opts for the direct quote: "Justice Amy Coney Barrett argues US Supreme Court isn't 'a bunch of partisan hacks'". If you click through that link and you've mainly seen discussion of the content of her speech rather than the context, you might wonder why a story about Barrett is filed under the tag of Mitch McConnell.
Bloomberg has the absolute best headline of the bunch: "Barrett, Flanked by McConnell, Says Supreme Court Isn’t Partisan", followed by a lede which reminds us:
Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the Supreme Court shouldn’t be seen as a partisan institution, as she made her first public remarks off the court since the day she won Senate confirmation on a strict party-line vote almost a year ago.
To jump back to the Yahoo! one that I held out as very typical, most of the headlines have included the word "perception" or "appearance", which is a key. Barrett -- appearing alongside ultrapartisan archconservative Mitch McConnell, who rammed her through as replacement for a much more progressive justice -- said that her job in the public appearance was to convince the public that she and her colleagues aren't partisan.
Nothing was said, that I can find, about any duty on her part to not be a partisan hack, nor about any worries that the court may be partisan in reality.
From this, we can infer that the partisanship of the high court is not a problem to her, either because she doesn't believe it exists or because she doesn't see it as a bad thing. Which of those more closely describes her conscious beliefs, her image of the court and herself, is a purely theoretical question and one that has no impact on the outcome.
The appearance of partisanship, for people to see that the court is partisan, on the other hand is a big problem, because it undermines the legitimacy of the power she and her partisan colleagues wield on behalf of the party, and raises the risk that the opposition party will find it appropriate to take steps to curtail it.
This is the flipside to the pitchforks-and-torches firebrand "populism" that is the sharp edge of the modern Republican Party: the staid and proper Establishment that is concerned, at least occasionally, with maintaining the appearance of propriety, at least at a bare minimum level to keep the across-the-aisle wing of the Establishment in their positions as comfortable champions of comity and cooperation.
That McConnell, Barrett's sponsor and patron, manages to so often embody both the cutting edge and the sturdy hilt of the weapon that is the Republican Party, is a testament to how low the bar is set for the GOP, how thin a veneer of "business as usual" is acceptable to those who are eager to see business being transacted as it usually is.
So while it may also be a bit in the column of "bare minimum", I am heartened to see reporting that President Biden and Senator Schumer are prepared to push harder on making progress where progress is possible (and necessary):
https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1437081899734818822
I wish I could say I'm enough of an optimist to believe that being willing to chuck the filibuster aside for voting rights was a slippery slope that would lead to unpacking the severely skewed Supreme Court, but it's heartening to know that there are limits to the genteel passivity of the Democratic establishment, especially considering how few there are on the activity of the GOP.