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White Male Says Amy Coney Barrett Is a ‘Shameless, Cynical Careerist’

Matt NahamOct 12th, 2020, 3:12 pm

Image via Fox News screengrab

Of all the dire prognostications and attempts to categorize Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, one take may just take the cake. Slate is catching some heat for reducing Barrett’s ascent—and presumed impact on American law for decades to come—to shameless careerism.

In “Amy Coney Barrett Is as Cynical as Trump,” Tom Scocca’s take was that Barrett, a legal scholar, lawyer, wife, circuit judge, Supreme Court nominee and mother to seven children all at the same time, should be understood as “a shameless, cynical careerist who believes nobody can stop her.”

The argument appears to be that Barrett’s decision to accept a nomination to the highest court in the land, despite the highly contentious circumstances surrounding the nomination, makes her selfish.

Scocca suggests that the problem with Barrett “isn’t that she’s too pious, or that she’s submissive in her personal life.” Rather, “[i]t’s that she’s bent on making herself one of the nine most powerful judges in the country, even if she has to do it in the most graspingly partisan and destructive way possible.” The Republican sprint to confirm Barrett this soon after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and this close to the election makes a complicit Barrett no different from President Donald Trump, Scocca argues:

What sort of prospective Supreme Court justice believes a president should get five years’ worth of court picks in a four-year term? The same kind who puts herself forward for an impossibly rushed confirmation process, and who declines to say if she’ll recuse herself from cases that might decide the reelection of the president who is taking such extraordinary measures to give her the job. Like McConnell and Trump, her vision of the law is based on nothing more than what she can get away with; the Constitution is a set of rules to be gamed for personal advantage, not a framework for popular legitimacy or justice. The entire presidency of Donald Trump has been building toward this moment, and Amy Coney Barrett is the woman he was waiting for.

This argument was widely condemned, and many noted that a white male was the one levying this criticism.

There were many more reactions like the above.

Scocca appears to be undeterred by the ratio, however.

[Image via Fox News screengrab]

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Matt Naham

Matt Naham is managing editor of Law&Crime. He formerly worked as news editor and weekend editor at Rare.

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