The Judge ACB hearings were a little anti-climactic with the Democrats walking out in protest, leaving oversized images of people with ‘preexisting conditions’ to sit in their seats in an impotent protest against her nomination.
The committee vote to move the hearings to the full Senate was unanimous, with zero Democrats present to vote against it.
The Republicans had free reign to make what points they deemed relevant to the occasion.
Senator Mike Lee’s contribution was absolute FIRE.
Senator Mike Lee put on a clinic, laying out a case — piece by piece — why Democrats are and have always been the only true threat to the third branch of government.
To give you a proper taste of what he said, we’ve transcribed the beginning of it.
We cannot recommend in strong enough terms the value of watching the entire seventeen minutes.
Thank you Mr. Chairman. It is indeed an honor to be here on this historic occasion when we’ve confirmed Judge Barrett and forwarded favorably to the floor our recommendation as I’ve since if as I’ve ever since she was nominated to this position. Judge Amy Coney Barrett is one of the most impressive legal minds in the United States.
She’s a thoughtful and fairminded lawyer, a loving daughter, wife, and mother, and a devout believer in her faith and in the Constitution. She is arguably the most impressive judicial nominee that I’ve ever seen in any of these hearings and I’ve been watching them intently since I was a kid.
Judge Barrett is going to make an absolutely outstanding Supreme Court Justice and the American people will be really lucky to have her on the bench. It is a shame that our colleagues on the other side, having failed to lay a glove on Judge Barret during the hearings have chosen to on this process and in so doing, to walk out on the American People.
This is sad, but in context, it is really not that surprising. I suppose we should be grateful that a walkout is all the Democrats will do to Judge Barrett today. Not all nominees have been so lucky. This is an important point for these watching those proceedings who might be tempted to believe the pious pearl-clutching and performance art of the media and the minority party.
About this particular nomination, I’d like to take a few moments to set the record straight about the history of this process and why America needs and deserves to have Judge Barrett on the Supreme Court.
For the first 200 years of the history of our Republic, Supreme Court nominations of both political parties were almost always polite, and even boring relatively non-partisan non-political affairs. Judicial nominees were examined by the Senate for their qualifications and were rejected by the Senate only in relatively rare instances.
But that era of generally common mutual respect ended in 1987 when a Democratic-controlled Senate shamefully and slanderously defeated the nomination of one of the country’s most respected lawyers and constitutional scholars, that is Judge Robert Bork.
The cynical attacks against Judge Bork, whose only offense was that he was a conservative, were dirty and they were downright dishonest. But like the boy who cried wolf, the Senate Democrats got away with it. At least the first time. Four years later, President George Herbert Walker Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas, then serving on the US court of appeals, for the DC circuit to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Democrats on the judiciary committee — Democrats, not Republicans — tried to do to Judge Thomas what they had done to Judge Bork a few years earlier.
The public was now wise to the Democrats’ game and that particular attack — while injurious — failed. So they resorted to the next tactic, organizing what Thomas rightly called a ‘high-tech lynching’ of a black man who dared disagree with the rich white liberals who ran the Democratic party when Democrats won back the White House in 1992. When the shoe was put on the other foot,
Senate Republicans did not respond in kind. In 1993, the famously liberal Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed to the Supreme Court with 96 votes. In 1984, Judge Stephen Breyer was confirmed with 87 votes. They went low, and in response, we went high.
Now, did Republicans’ good faith behavior influence or improve the Democrats’ behavior? No. The record suggests that it only encouraged them. Within a decade, Democrats once again breached norms.
They unilaterally escalated their war over the judiciary by filibustering for the first time in history a judicial nominee, Miguel Estrada. Mr Estrada was and remains to this day one of the ost respected lawyers and constitutional scholars in the country. He was a natural and inspiring choice to serve as a federal appellate judge. But to the left, you see that was precisely the problem.
Mr. Estrada was Latino, and a brilliant, and charismatic and young, and widely seen as a future nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. So the Left decided to strangle Mr. Estrada’s nomination with false, insincere attacks and unprecedented obstructionism.
They filibustered Mr. Estrada’s nomination, not once, not twice, but seven times.
this is just the first of seventeen minutes of all the things the Democrats do NOT want the public to know about which party is REALLY using political dirty tricks to remake the courts to achieve private political ends.
