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The rushed appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court tells a story of a party aware of its own weaknesses. The nation is a week out from a national election that Republicans may very well lose. And in the long run, the GOP remains threatened by a generational changing of the guard.
As such, Barrett’s seat on the court, which rounds out a 6-3 conservative majority, is best understood as a political Hail Mary, thrown by a party that anticipates losing legislative ground for the near future, our writers argue.
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The Republican Party understands that Barrett’s confirmation is coming just a week before a potential electoral “bloodbath.” They don’t care, Emma Green reports.
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The push to confirm Barrett—and other federal judges—is really an attempt to counter a changing electorate. “Every young conservative judge that the GOP has stacked onto the federal courts amounts to a sandbag against that rising demographic wave,” our polling expert Ronald Brownstein writes.
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Barrett’s preferred judicial philosophy doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, Senator Angus King Jr. and the professor Heather Cox Richardson argue: “Originalism is an intellectual cloak drummed up (somewhat recently) to dignify a profoundly retrogressive view of the Constitution.”
8 days remain until the 2020 presidential election. Here’s today’s essential read:
