Yes. The republicans could do that right now if they really wanted to. The only thing it would require is getting rid of the filibuster which is not a terribly popular idea among either party. If they did that then all it would require is a simple majority of the vote.
I don’t think the dems will be able to do it even if they decide they want to. There will surely be several Democrats who would vote against it and that would be enough to derail the effort. Plus Biden has said before that he is not in favor of doing that. Though he is currently being coy about it so maybe he’s changed his tune.
Kind of odd that some outlets would go there in that case.
Why make threats about something your side could maybe do down the line, and give the other team ideas about doing it right now while they're in power?
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
"Judge Amy Coney Barrett may be in line to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, but leftists are out to stop conservatives from usurping another hand-me-down from the “Notorious RBG:” her nickname.
Before Barrett was officially nominated to Ginsburg’s seat, groups pressing for her selection began selling tee shirts naming Barrett the “Notorious ACB” — a play on Ginsburg’s branding — or, alternatively, “Glorious ACB,” a reference to Barrett’s Catholic faith, which has become a front-and-center issue in the media."
Lol
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
__________________ posted by Badabing
I don't know why some of you are going on about being right and winning. Rob and Impediment were in on this gag because I PMed them. Silent and Rao PMed me and figured I changed the post. I highly doubt anybody thought Quan made the post, but simply played along just for the lulz.
I watched the full 12 minute speech from Amy Coney Barrett.
I liked what I heard about interpreting the law as written, not making new laws through judicial activism. She said that's on the legislative branch to do.
100% correct.
So I looked up her ruling records on Wikipedia, which is consistently a left-leaning wiki.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972
In June 2019, the court, in a unanimous decision written by Barrett, reinstated a suit brought by a male Purdue University student (John Doe) who had been found guilty of sexual assault by Purdue University, which resulted in a one-year suspension, loss of his Navy ROTC scholarship, and expulsion from the ROTC affecting his ability to pursue his chosen career in the Navy.[52][53] Doe alleged the school's Advisory Committee on Equity discriminated against him on the basis of his sex and violated his rights to due process by not interviewing the alleged victim, not allowing him to present evidence in his defense, including an erroneous statement that he confessed to some of the alleged assault, and appearing to believe the victim instead of the accused without hearing from either party or having even read the investigation report. The court found that Doe had adequately alleged that the university deprived him of his occupational liberty without due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and had violated his Title IX rights "by imposing a punishment infected by sex bias", and remanded to the District Court for further proceedings.[54][55]
Employment discrimination
In 2017, the Seventh Circuit had rejected the federal government's appeal in a civil lawsuit against AutoZone; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission argued that AutoZone's assignment of employees to different stores based on race (e.g., "sending African American employees to stores in heavily African American neighborhoods") violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Following this, Barrett joined the court in time to receive a petition for rehearing en banc. Three judges—Chief Judge Diane Wood and Judges Ilana Rovner and David Hamilton—voted to grant rehearing, and criticized the three-judge panel's opinion as upholding a "separate-but-equal arrangement". Barrett did not join the panel opinion, but voted with four judges to deny the petition to rehear the case. The petition was unsuccessful by a 5-3 decision.[56][17]
Immigration
In June 2020, Barrett wrote a 40-page dissent when the majority upheld a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration's controversial "public charge rule", which heightened the standard for obtaining a green card.[57] In her dissent, she argued that any noncitizens who disenrolled from government benefits because of the rule did so due to confusion about the rule itself rather than from its application, writing that the vast majority of the people subject to the rule are not eligible for government benefits in the first place. On the merits, Barrett departed from her colleagues Wood and Rovner, who held that DHS's interpretation of that provision was unreasonable under Chevron Step Two. Barrett would have held that the new rule fell within the broad scope of discretion granted to the Executive by Congress through the Immigration and Nationality Act.[58] The public charge issue is the subject of a circuit split.[58][59]
In May 2019, the court rejected a Yemeni citizen and her U.S. citizen husband's challenge to a consular officer's decision to twice deny her visa application under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The U.S. citizen, argued that this had deprived him of a constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse.[60] In a 2-1 majority opinion authored by Barrett, the court held that the plaintiff's claim was properly dismissed under the doctrine of consular nonreviewability. Barrett declined to address whether the husband had been denied a constitutional right (or whether the constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse existed at all) because the consular officer's decision to deny Ahmad's visa application was facially legitimate and bona fide, and under Supreme Court precedent, in such a case courts will not "look behind the exercise of that discretion". The dispute concerned what it takes to satisfy this standard. Yafai's subsequent petition for rehearing en banc was denied, with Chief Judge Wood, joined by Judges Rovner and Hamilton, dissenting. Barrett wrote a rare opinion concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc (joined by Judge Joel Flaum).[60][61]
Abortion-related cases
Barrett has never ruled directly on abortion, but she did vote to rehear a successful challenge to Indiana's parental notification law in 2019. In 2018, she voted against striking down another Indiana law requiring burial or cremation of fetal remains. In both cases, Barrett voted with the minority. The Supreme Court later reinstated the fetal remains law, and in July 2020 it ordered a rehearing in the parental notification case.[62][63]
In February 2019, Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision upholding a Chicago "bubble ordinance" that prohibits approaching within a certain distance of an abortion clinic or its patrons without consent.[64][65] Citing the Supreme Court's buffer zone decision in Hill v. Colorado, the court rejected the plaintiffs' challenge to the ordinance on First Amendment grounds.[66]
Second Amendment
In March 2019, Barrett dissented when the court upheld a law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms.[67] The majority rejected the as-applied challenge raised by the plaintiff, who had a nonviolent felony conviction for mail fraud, and upheld the felony dispossession statute as "substantially related to an important government interest in preventing gun violence." In her dissent, Barrett argued that while the government has a legitimate interest in denying gun possession to felons convicted of violent crimes, there is no evidence that denying guns to nonviolent felons promotes this interest, and that the law violates the Second Amendment.[68]
Fourth Amendment
In August 2018, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it determined that the police had lacked probable cause to search a vehicle based solely upon an anonymous tip that people were "playing with guns" because no crime had been alleged.[69] Barrett distinguished Navarette v. California and wrote, "the police were right to respond to the anonymous call by coming to the parking lot to determine what was happening. But determining what was happening and immediately seizing people upon arrival are two different things, and the latter was premature...Watson's case presents a close call. But this one falls on the wrong side of the Fourth Amendment."[70]
February 2019, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it found that police officers had been unreasonable to assume "that a woman who answers the door in a bathrobe has authority to consent to a search of a male suspect's residence." Therefore, the district court should have granted the defendant's motion to suppress evidence found in the residence as the fruit of an unconstitutional search.[71][72]
Qualified immunity
In January 2019, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it denied qualified immunity to a civil lawsuit sought by a defendant who as a homicide detective had knowingly provided false and misleading information in the probable cause affidavit that was used to obtain an arrest warrant for the plaintiff.[73] (The charges were later dropped and the plaintiff was released.) The court found the defendant's lies and omissions violated "clearly established law" and the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment rights and thus the detective was not shielded by qualified immunity.[74]
In Howard v. Koeller (7th Cir. 2018), in an unsigned order by a three-judge panel that included Barrett, the court found that qualified immunity did not protect a prison officer who had labeled a prisoner a "snitch" and thereby exposed him to risk from his fellow inmates.[75][76]
Environment
In Orchard Hill Building Co. v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 893 F.3d 1017 (7th Cir. 2018), Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision, written by Judge Amy J. St. Eve, in a case brought by a property developer challenging the Corps' determination that a wetland 11 mi (18 km) from the nearest navigable river was among the "waters of the United States." The court found that the Corps had not provided substantial evidence of a significant nexus to navigable‐in‐fact waters and remanded.[77] As a result, the property was not protected from development under the Clean Water Act.[78]
Consumer protection
In Dalton v. Teva North America, 891 F.3d 687 (7th Cir. 2018), a patient sued Teva Pharmaceuticals after her IUD broke during removal with a piece remaining in her uterus. Her doctor said she now required a hysterectomy. A district court found in the manufacturer's favor. The Seventh Circuit affirmed; in an opinion for a unanimous panel, Barrett cited the lack of expert testimony to support plaintiff's contention of a defect in the IUD, writing, "the issue of causation in her case is not obvious."[79][80][81]
Coronavirus measures
In early September 2020, Barrett joined Wood's opinion upholding the district court's denial of the Illinois Republican Party's request for a preliminary injunction to block Governor J. B. Pritzker's COVID-19 orders.[18][82]
Civil procedure and standing
In Casillas v. Madison Ave. Associates, Inc., 926 F.3d 329 (7th Cir. 2019), the plaintiff brought a class-action lawsuit against Madison Avenue, alleging that the company violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) when it sent her a debt-collection letter that described the FDCPA process for verifying a debt but failed to specify in the letter that she was required to respond in writing to trigger the FDCPA protections. Casillas did not allege that she had tried to verify her debt and trigger the statutory protections under the FDCPA, or that the amount owed was in any doubt. In a decision written by Barrett, the panel, citing the Supreme Court's decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, found that the plaintiff's allegation of receiving incorrect or incomplete information was only a "bare procedural violation" that was insufficiently concrete to satisfy the Article III's injury-in-fact requirement. Wood dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc. The issue created a circuit split.[83][84][85]
In Shakman v. Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, 969 F.3d 810 (7th Cir. 2020), the court held, in a decision written by Barrett and joined by the other two members of the panel, that a Teamsters local did not have standing to appeal an order in the Shakman case because it was not formally a party to the case. The union had not intervened in the action, but rather merely submitted a memorandum in the district court opposing a motion, which the Seventh Circuit determined was insufficient to give the union a right to appeal.[86][87]
Barrett is a constitutional scholar with expertise in statutory interpretation.[15]
Textualism and originalism
Barrett is a textualist[88][89][90] and an originalist (of the original-public-meaning, rather than original-intent, variety).[91][92][93] According to Barrett, "Originalism is characterized by a commitment to two core principles. First, the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed at the time of its ratification. Second, the historical meaning of the text 'has legal significance and is authoritative in most circumstances.'"[91] For the purpose of "describing the disagreement between originalists and nonoriginalists about the authoritativeness of the original public meaning," she refers[91] to a section of a law review article by Keith E. Whittington, titled Originalism: A Critical Introduction,[94] where it is said: "Critics of originalism have suggested a range of considerations that might trump original meaning if the two were to come into conflict. From this perspective, fidelity to original meaning is not the chief goal of constitutional theory. ...Confronted with suitably unpleasant results, the nonoriginalist might posit that the original meaning should be sacrificed. Alternatively, we might think that contemporary public opinion should trump original meaning. ...Underlying all these considerations is a view that courts are authorized to impose constitutional rules other than those adopted by the constitutional drafters. ...the originalist must insist that judges not close their eyes to the discoverable meaning of the Constitution and announce some other constitutional rule to supersede it. It is at that point that the originalist and the nonoriginalist must part ways."[94]
Textualism, Barrett says, requires that judges construe statutory language consistent with its "ordinary meaning": "The law is comprised of words—and textualists emphasize that words mean what they say, not what a judge thinks that they ought to say." According to Barrett, "Textualism stands in contrast to purposivism, a method of statutory interpretation that was dominant through much of the 20th century." If a court concludes that statutory language appears to be in tension with a statute's overarching goal, "purposivists argue that a judge should go with the goal rather than the text". For Barrett, textualism is not literalism, nor is it about rigid dictionary definitions. "It is about identifying the plain communicative content of the words".[95]
Barrett clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and has spoken and written of her admiration of his adherence to the text of statutes and to originalism,[96] writing: "His judicial philosophy is mine, too. A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they may hold."[97] In one article she quoted Justice Scalia concerning the importance of the original meaning of the Constitution: "The validity of government depends upon the consent of the governed ... [s]o what the people agreed to when they adopted the Constitution ... is what ought to govern us."[91] In a 2017 article in the law review Constitutional Commentary, reviewing a book by Randy E. Barnett, Barrett wrote: "The Constitution's original public meaning is important not because adhering to it limits judicial discretion, but because it is the law. ...The Constitution's meaning is fixed until lawfully changed; thus, the court must stick with the original public meaning of the text even if it rules out the preference of a current majority."[98][99]
According to Barrett, textualists believe that when a court interprets the words of statutes, it should use the most natural meaning of those words to an ordinary skilled user of words at the time, even if the court believes that the legislature intended that the words be understood in a special or idiosyncratic sense. If the legislature wishes the words of a statute to carry a special meaning different from how a non-legislator would understand them, it is free to define the terms in the statute. As Scalia put it, "[A]ll we can know is that [the legislature] voted for a text that they presumably thought would be read the same way any reasonable English speaker would read it." Scalia insisted that "it is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than by what the lawmaker promulgated."[100][101]
Barrett has been critical of legal process theory, which gives a more expansive role to theory in shaping the interpretation of law than do textualism and originalism.[100][101] She said that one example of the "process-based" approach can be found in King v. Burwell, in which the Supreme Court, for reasons related to the unorthodox legislative process that produced the Affordable Care Act, interpreted the phrase "Exchange established by the State" to mean "Exchange established by the State or the federal government."[101]
Suspension of habeas corpus
In a journal article, "Suspension and Delegation",[102] Barrett noted that constitutionally only Congress has the authority to decide the terms under which habeas corpus may be legitimately suspended.[103] In all but one of the previous suspensions of habeas corpus, Barrett thought that Congress violated the Constitution "by enacting a suspension statute before an invasion or rebellion occurred—and in some instances, before one was even on the horizon."[104][102] In an educational essay, she sided with the dissenters in Boumediene v. Bush after considering historical factors.[105]
In 2018 Barrett wrote a dissent from the majority opinion in Schmidt v. Foster 17-1727 891 F.3d 302 (7th Cir. 2018),[106] in which one of the factors considered was the scope of the defendant's habeas corpus rights. She applied her historical understanding in an argument that the defendant's habeas corpus rights had not been violated when a review was conducted without permitting his lawyer to participate.[107] Following the en banc hearing, a majority of ten judges agreed with her position.[104]
Precedent
At her 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett said she would follow Supreme Court precedent while on the appellate bench. According to The Hill, Barrett would "have much more leeway" to overturn its precedents as a member of the Court.[108] In her nomination acceptance speech at the White House Rose Garden, Barrett said, "Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold";[109][110] she has also said that judges "must apply the law as written".[111][112]
In a 2013 article in Texas Law Review on the doctrine of stare decisis, Barrett listed seven cases that she believed should be considered "superprecedents"—cases the court would never consider overturning. They included Brown v. Board of Education and Mapp v. Ohio (incorporating the Fourth Amendment onto the states),[113] but specifically excluded Roe v. Wade (1973). In explaining why it was excluded, Barrett referenced scholarship agreeing that in order to qualify as "superprecedent", a decision must have widespread support from not only jurists but politicians and the public at large to the extent of becoming immune to reversal or challenge (for example, the constitutionality of paper money). She argued that the people must trust a ruling's validity to such an extent that the matter has been taken "off of the court's agenda", with lower courts no longer taking challenges to them seriously. Barrett pointed to Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) as evidence that Roe had not attained this status, and quoted Richard H. Fallon Jr.: "[A] decision as fiercely and enduringly contested as Roe v. Wade has acquired no immunity from serious judicial reconsideration, even if arguments for overruling it ought not succeed."[113][114]
Concerning the relationship of textualism to precedent, Barrett said, "It makes sense that one committed to a textualist theory would more often find precedent in conflict with her interpretation of the Constitution than would one who takes a more flexible, all-things-considered approach."[113] She referenced a study by Michael Gerhardt which found that, as of 1994, no two justices in that century had called for overruling more precedents than Justices Scalia and Hugo Black, both of whom were textualists, even though Black was a liberal and Scalia a conservative. Gerhardt also found that during the Rehnquist court's last 11 years, the average number of times a justice called for the overruling of precedent was higher for textualist justices, with one per year coming from Ginsburg (non-textualist) up to just over two per year from Thomas (textualist). Gerhardt wrote that not all the calls for overruling were related to textualism issues, and that one must be careful in the inferences one draws from the numbers, which "do not indicate either why or on what basis the justices urged overruling."[113]
Affordable Care Act
In 2012, Barrett signed a letter criticizing the Obama administration's approach to providing employees of religious institutions with birth control coverage without having the religious institutions pay for it.[115]
Barrett has been critical of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (2012), which upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. She wrote in 2017: "Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power; had he treated the payment as the statute did—as a penalty—he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress’s commerce power."[99][116][115][117]
Abortion
Barrett personally opposes abortion.[118][119] In 2006, she signed an advertisement placed by St. Joseph County Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, in a South Bend, Indiana, newspaper. The advertisement read, "We, the following citizens of Michiana, oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death. Please continue to pray to end abortion." An unsigned, second page of the advertisement read, "It's time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children."[120][121][122] In 2013, she signed another ad against Roe v. Wade that appeared in Notre Dame's student newspaper and described the decision as having "killed 55 million unborn children". The same year, she spoke at two anti-abortion events at Notre Dame.[123]
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
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