Does She Think The Constitution Matters?

 

Wow. Under questioning from Booker, Coney Barrett won't even say that she thinks presidents should commit to the peaceful transfer of power pic.twitter.com/C7JveeawKZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 13, 2020

It's a little bit much when Judge Coney Barrett pretends that she hasn't paid attention to the President's pronouncements regarding the ACA and hardly suspected at all that she might be nominated to SCOTUS by this president.  She says she isn't hostile to the Act, but I surmise this only means she would strike it down cold-bloodedly and without any particular passion as a part of the job. 

Coney Barrett also equivocated on whether a president could delay an election or whether voter intimidation was okay--and these are black letter sorts of things. She also seemed loathe to nix the idea that a president could issue himself a blanket pardon. I'm not sure what kind of originalist or textualist comes up so empty regarding our established norms, but I highly doubt that any person who swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and takes it seriously, should think these things are actually open for discussion at a later date, as opposed to just being entirely understood as wrong. 

To my mind, this fails a test regarding her fidelity to our creedal nation's actual basis for existence, being superimposed by her own ideology. Or maybe, it just reveals a failure of the spine, to stand up against the possibility that a capricious president might nominate a judge on the basis of supposed loyalty, but then withdraw nomination if they proved not loyal enough. Either is disqualifying. 

The more I see of her, the less impressive she seems.