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Nominating Amy Barrett Would Be Political Genius

The desperation of the Democrats to stop the apparently inexorable rise of a president they so completely discounted and despised, and assumed they could remove or emasculate just by turning up the volume and activity of their media organ monkeys, may drive them to accidental suicide over the latest Supreme Court vacancy. I have no standing at all to intuit whom the president may nominate. But if, as I suspect, it is Judge Amy Barrett, it would be a tactical masterpiece on the level of Napoleon’s conduct of the Battle of Austerlitz or Hannibal at Cannae.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Barrett to the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on October 31, by a 55-43 vote. Three Democrats voted for her and two did not vote. It would not be easy to justify changing their votes now, as she has served unexceptionably. At her confirmation hearings, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee’s aged ranking Democrat, asked Barrett about her religious views, and the nominee responded that no judge should allow personal views, whether based on faith or anything else, to influence the imposition of the law. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern,” Feinstein said infamously. This was an outrageous comment; Feinstein doesn’t know anything about the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, and she has no idea what privately motivates Judge Barrett.

The fury and haste of the Democrats once the starting gun went off with the announcement of the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court, expressed their blind panic that their entire protracted regime of encroachments and embellishments on the Constitution—buttressing their centralized and authoritarian notion of administrative juridical governance with pretense to defending the rights of women, affirmative action, and the legislative role of the judiciary generally—was now under mortal assault.

Both sides have followed the legendary practice of Irish footballers of getting their retaliation in first, and in an astonishing permutation of the ambitions of the country’s founders for a non-political judiciary, have launched massive television advertising blitzes to whip up opinion for and against the president’s nominee, whose identity will not be made known before Monday.

Roe Über Alles
The Democrats seem convinced, and are in any case trying to convince the country, that the president is going to assault the authority of Roe v. Wade, the shabbily reasoned decision of 1973 that gave a carte blanche to abortion on the ground of a woman’s right to determine what goes on within her own body. They have amplified this issue, vital though it is, to personing the barricades for the female sex against the president, and defending it against chauvinism, servitude, serfdom, and concubinage.

Knowing the president as we now do, it is hard to believe that he can resist the temptation of giving battle, putting forth Judge Barrett as his candidate as an entirely qualified, recently Senate-approved, woman judge who is on record as resisting personal feelings in the application of the law, and is in all respects a poster-lady for contemporary career women and for devoted wives and mothers, with five natural and two adopted (Haitian) children. She is a distinguished alumna and 16-year law faculty member of Notre Dame University, former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, a member of the Federalist Society, and practicing Roman Catholic. There are signs, as seasoned and balanced news commentator Brit Hume of Fox News remarked this week, that the Democrats are cranking up to portray her, if she is the Supreme Court nominee, as “a kook.”

It is, in Keatsian terms, “a wild surmise,” but I believe the president is luring the Democrats into a trap constructed of their own witless fanaticism, compounded by his long victory streak as he has stretched them out on the rack of elusive, tantalizing, but evanescent semblances of vulnerability.

Muslim migration, white supremacy (Charlottesville), war in Korea, health care, breaks for the rich and ”crumbs” for everyone else, Russian collusion (now reduced to quarterly onslaughts against Paul Manafort for matters that allegedly happened years before he knew Trump, and down-loaded harassment of one of Trump’s many lawyers, Michael Cohen); it’s all piffle. The Democratic media cannon will fire on command: Joe and Mika, the malignant CNN dunciad, the pitiful wailing sirens of the old networks, and of the Times and Post, will all rage and foam and fume at the nominee, whoever it is, but it is the sporadic fire of a defeated army.

I believe the president will nominate Barrett, that the Democrats will take definitive leave of their depleted senses, apostrophize the judge as a Trojan Horse of female submission, that she will clear her hearings with flying colors while the president’s formidable battery of social media and talk show supporters roast the Democrats for attacking an exemplary female achiever and a fine jurist whose only offense is to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest in the country with more than 70 million adherents. Remember, too, the Supreme Court in the final days of its term ruled that crisis pregnancy centers need not advertise the virtues of abortion with Planned Parenthood, and in 2016 said the Little Sisters of the Poor could not be compelled to pay for birth control and sterilization.

Watch Them Crumble
As at Cannae and at Austerlitz, the center of the defending force (Democrats), will crumble and President Trump will sweep the field. The Democratic playbook of endless ear-splitting allegations of serial outrages by the president, will not, finally, bring him down. On this issue, of mobilizing unfounded sexist paranoia against a flawless nominee, thereby insulting tens of millions of American women and U.S. Roman Catholics, before raising the objections of fair-minded non-Catholic men, at least another 20 percent of the population, the Democrats will immolate themselves in an unprecedentedly spectacular launch of their midterm election campaign.

If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned, it will send abortion to the states for individual regulation, not confine reluctantly pregnant Americans to back alleys and butchers. This controversy, if it happens, will also expose the hypocrisy of the Joe Biden-John Kerry school of Catholicism, that in the name of liberality declines to “impose” anything on anyone and redefines the Church of Rome that Christ allegedly asked St. Peter to found, as lapsed Unitarianism leavened by Catholic church-step photo-ops.

With their demand for a rollback of the Trump tax cuts and their affection for open borders, the hydra-headed pygmy army of the once (and future) great Democratic Party will complete the conversion of the blue wave, en route to the electoral shore, to a crimson tide of molten lava. It could be a merciful and early deliverance of the Democrats from rabid Sandersism, the self-destructive fantasy of Democratic Socialism, and spare them a reenacted McGovern electoral suicide.

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About Conrad Black

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.