Let’s be honest: it’s rare—and I mean very rare—that anything President Trump says or does can be called, “brilliant” or “flawless.” Instead, Mr. Trump is usually cringy, tactless, blustering, or frankly, downright offensive. And yet this weekend, Trump did something truly, authentically, indisputably brilliant: he nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Contrary to what you might think, I’m not celebrating Judge Coney Barrett’s nomination because I’m laboring under the delusion that she’ll help usher in an era marked by the kind of dystopian oppression and misogyny (à la The Handmaid’s Tale) that our detractors seem think we’re advocating for over here at the Review. No—I am elated because Coney Barrett is going to make a good Justice. Hell, she’s going to make an excellent Justice, one that will uphold the Constitution, defend the basic rights of all Americans, and serve her country brilliantly for the next several decades.
The point of this article, however, is not just to make it clear that the Review is absolutely delighted about Coney Barrett’s nomination (although we are); it’s to prove to our classmates, professors, and administrators that they should be too. See, over the next few weeks, politicians, members of the media, and activists are going to launch a character assassination campaign on Coney Barrett that will be so thorough, so vicious, and so incredibly heinous that most Americans—if they aren’t paying attention to Coney Barrett’s actual confirmation hearings—will think that she’s a member of a long-lost Catholic sect of Al-Qaeda. In fact, the smear campaign has already started.
Here are a few examples.
Ibram Kendi, the author of How To Be an Anti-Racist, implied that Coney Barrett, who is white, is racist because she adopted children from Haiti. Meanwhile, plenty of people—including liberal Catholic intellectuals—are shamelessly attacking Coney Barrett’s religious beliefs. News outlets are charging forward with a patently false claim that an ecumenical faith group that Coney Barrett belongs to, the People of Praise, is a viciously sexist and cultish organization. (These journalists have yet to explain how Coney Barrett, a woman, managed to reach the pinnacle of legal success while simultaneously being controlled by—or allied with—a group of vicious misogynists who won’t let woman out of the kitchen.)
Her detractors also claim that Coney Barrett’s Catholicism will prevent her from fairly interpreting the law, despite the fact that plenty of good judges, both Democrats and Republicans, have been practicing Catholics. Those making this particular argument don’t seem to notice the irony: while Coney Barrett has consistently demonstrated that her faith won’t prevent her from upholding the law, her detractors are violating Article IV, Clause III of the Constitution, which prohibits lawmakers from using religious tests to bar people from holding public office. In other words, the only people who have let questions of faith prevent them from fairly applying the law are the anti-Catholic clowns coming after Coney Barrett.
And guess what? The official confirmation hearings won’t even start for another two weeks.
So, instead of buying into the ridiculous narrative that Coney Barrett—a 48-year-old, Honda-Odyssey-driving mother of seven—is a vicious fascist who’s coming for your uterus, let’s take a step back and evaluate Coney Barrett based on criteria that actually matter: her intellect, her legal acumen, and her personal character.
Let’s start with the fact that Coney Barrett graduated first in her class from Notre Dame’s law school. One of her professors, John Garvey, was so amazed by an answer Coney Barrett gave on an exam that he ran and shared her response with his colleagues. Her answer, he told them, was “better than the one I had come up with myself.” A few years later, when Garvey wrote a letter to Justice Scalia to recommend that he (Scalia) hire Coney Barrett as a clerk, he only wrote one sentence: “Amy Coney is the best student I ever had.”
Her fellow clerks seem to agree with Garvey’s assessment. Noah Feldman, a self-identified liberal who teaches law at Harvard, wrote an opinion piece this weekend where he asserted that, of the nearly 40 clerks who served during the 1998-99 term, “Barrett stood out. Measured subjectively and unscientifically by pure legal acumen, she was one of the two strongest lawyers. The other was Jenny Martinez, now dean of the Stanford Law School.” Feldman isn’t the only former clerk who has sung Coney Barrett’s praises: when she was nominated for the 7th Circuit in 2017, every single person she’d clerked with—many of them prominent liberal lawyers, deans, and professors—signed a letter of recommendation for her. So did all her colleagues at Notre Dame.
If you’re not at least a little impressed, you’re lying to yourself.
But Coney Barrett is more than a legal genius. She is also a mother of seven, and, according to those who know her, a woman of unimpeachable character. One of her colleagues has described her as, “one of the most generous people I have ever met.” That checks out, given that, in order to paint her as a monster, Democrats have resorted to attacking Barrett’s decision to adopt children from Haiti after an earthquake. This woman is so genuinely good that people are trying to spin an act of heroic love as some bizarre expression of white supremacy.
In fact, the only issue I can find with Coney Barrett—and I have looked—is that she’s crazy enough to accept Trump’s nomination and put herself, like a human target, at the end of the Democrat’s cancel-culture firing range. But even then, Coney Barrett seems like an excellent candidate: she has consistently exhibited a remarkable capacity to stay calm under pressure and classy in the face of calumny. If anyone in America is cut out for the absolute torrent of abuse about to come her way, it’s Coney Barrett.
In fact, the Senate Democrats, despite their extensive expertise when it comes to character assassination, might have finally met their match.
So please, shut out the hailstorm of slander and see Amy Coney Barrett as she really is: a brilliant lawyer, an incredibly accomplished jurist, a mother of seven, a beacon of kindness, and frankly, an inspiration to us all. I assure you, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative: America does not deserve Amy Coney Barrett. This is, quite literally, the best thing to happen in this hellish year. Just… enjoy it, okay?