Amy Coney Barrett and the dogma that didn’t bark

Amy Coney Barrett, at her confirmation hearing last week, could prove to be a model for a post-Trumpian conservatism. Picture: AFP

There was no borking. There was no perfectly timed dump of some sordid allegation dredged up from 30 years ago. There was no anti-Catholic bigotry.

It was the dogma that didn’t bark — with apologies to Dianne Feinstein, who was so well-behaved last week that she now faces a cashiering from the progressive ranks for dereliction of her duty to kneecap conservatives.

Yet there were little moments of infamy that highlight what Democrats are really up to under the guise of a US Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Cory Booker asking a mother of two black children to condemn white supremacy. Sheldon Whitehouse’s Fully Illustrated Theory of Everything. A hasty attempt to turn the term “sexual preference” into a slur. And from the wings, the usual supportive assaults from the media, a medley of mudslinging, a susurration of sneers and jibes about the clothing, the smile, the look. All designed to warn us that behind the veneer of jurisprudential poise and Middle American decency, Amy Coney Barrett is some theocratic medievalist monster, primed to send women back to the kitchen, African-Americans back to the plantations and the country back to serfdom.

But it’s not working. This Handmaid’s Tale is as fictional as the one with the red cloaks and white bonnets. Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee knew it too and merely went through the motions, posturing and sloganeering, milling grist for a larger offensive on the constitution should things go their way at the polls next month.

It’s not over yet. Perhaps in the remaining week or so, the mask — real or figurative — will slip, and we will get to see the real ACB for the threat to freedom we are told she is. Perhaps some last-minute revelation will derail the confirmation. Perhaps Twitter or Facebook can somehow come to the left’s rescue again and find some clever digital way to nullify the process.

Perhaps. But unlikely. Her confirmation, when it comes, may have an even larger significance than it currently seems. The evidence from last week is that Barrett is not merely an impeccably qualified candidate for a position on the high court, exactly the kind of jurist any constitutional republic would want among its highest legal authorities. She may also prove a beacon for a conservative movement navigating turbulent and dismaying times. If these turn out to be the dying days of the Trump presidency, ahead of a defeat that could presage a sharp rebuff to the ideals of limited government and individual liberty, her confirmation — its process and its outcome — offers the outline of a route back for a conservatism that can rebuild and thrive in adversity.

It’s not only that she will presumably be a vital sixth (or fifth) vote for originalism and restraint, which will be much in need in the next few years if an activist government threatens further inroads into individual freedom. It’s that in her personality and character as much as in her philosophy, Barrett could prove to be a model for a post-Trumpian conservatism, one that marries the remarkable achievements for conservatives this President has secured in office with a set of values and a rhetoric better suited to sustain those achievements.

At a time when the gender gap seems larger than ever, in part because millions of women are turned off by unbecoming presidential language and behaviour, she’s a powerful reminder that “conservative woman” is not an oxymoron as the progressives want you to believe. That you can be pro-life and a wildly successful professional, a mother and a wife and a superstar.

Not only a woman but a woman at the centre of a multiracial family. Judge Barrett didn’t need some carefully focus-grouped verbal formula to express her empathy with victims of racial injustice. Her moving account of how she wept with her daughter in the days after George Floyd’s death was as compassionate and unifying a message as any Republican has come up with in months. You couldn’t devise a more compelling statement of the obvious truth that you can be a conservative and someone who believes in true equality.

She’s not running for political office. Indeed, she spent most of the process patiently explaining exactly why judges aren’t and shouldn’t be lawmakers.

But the philosophy she articulates, the principles she judges by, and the values she lives by offer important lessons for conservatives on the campaign trail as much as conservatives on the bench.

The Wall Street Journal