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Opinion: I’m voting for Joe Biden. I also think the Senate should confirm Judge Barrett

Opinion: I’m voting for Joe Biden. I also think the Senate should confirm Judge Barrett




This melee of shouting extremes will crowd out nuanced positions, so let me offer one here: Joe Biden should be elected president, and Judge Barrett should be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.

Young voters like myself are coming of age within a political culture teeming with binaries. We’re constantly confronted with “either-or” choices, and we’re told that our position on one issue should dictate our position on another. Nuanced judgments are discredited; passionate team players are celebrated. I’m tired of it. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can think through distinct political questions and consider them separately on their own merits. We can be critical political thinkers, reaching positions that don’t fit snugly into today’s overly simplistic, binary politics.

One can be a principled supporter of both Biden and Barrett by accepting two important premises, one rooted in common sense, the other born of knowledge of our constitutional structure.

The US is a gigantic, immensely diverse nation comprised of millions of people of differing races, religions and worldviews. American democracy is not built on especially solid ground. Most other nations enjoy thick ties of shared ethnicity or religious views that hold the ship of state together even in the most difficult of times, while America is home to deep divisions along the lines of race, religion and worldview. Although our diversity is of course an immense source of strength, there are times when our differences push us into dangerous territory, as civic bonds fray under the duress of distrust and dislike. As summers like this last one and campaign seasons like the current one remind us, there are plenty of deep-seated prejudices, grievances and hatreds in our nation that can easily be exploited.
There's no good case against confirming Amy Coney Barrett
While diversity and contention are part of what defines us, we should not willfully push our politics into directions that exacerbate existing contempt for one another. Politicians must not paper over our differences, of course, because so often our diversity is what makes us such an interesting, messy and beautiful country. But politicians should not needlessly amplify our most deep-seated tensions, as President Donald Trump has routinely done.

Instead, our leaders must be able to locate our points of commonality and elevate them, especially on the national stage, in order to build the consensus that we need to hang together. This is necessary to make improvements in areas like healthcare and economic security — policy realms relevant to all Americans, no matter their race or the uniform they wear in the culture wars. I believe former Vice President Joe Biden has the desire and the ability to do this, and to refocus the attention of Washington, DC, on securing American lives and livelihoods. For that, he earns my vote.

But supporting Biden need not translate into denouncing Judge Amy Coney Barrett. As an originalist, Judge Barrett interprets the text of the Constitution on its own terms; she does not accept the notion that the text is constantly evolving or that judges are responsible for unearthing unarticulated, underlying principles out of the plain meaning of the text.
Democrats know they will lose on Barrett, but are aiming for a bigger win

Barrett’s judicial philosophy acknowledges that neither she nor her future colleagues on the Supreme Court are in charge — the American people are. If Mississippians want to restrict abortion rights or New Yorkers want to expand transgender rights, they will likely have a friend in both the Constitution and in Judge Barrett. In light of the immense diversity of this nation, allowing different people to govern themselves in different ways — so long as they do not run afoul of the bedrock protections of the Bill of Rights — seems like an eminently reasonable way forward.

And as citizens, it is up to us and our elected representatives to forge that way forward for ourselves — not our judges. The coming opposition to Judge Barrett’s nomination will cloak itself in the language of democracy, but in fact it will reveal a deep distrust of self-government. As senators lambaste Barrett as a threat to democracy, they themselves will in fact be lamenting Judge Barrett’s refusal to stand in the way of democracy. Hers is a hands-off, textualist approach that simply raises the stakes on our democratic politics. This makes it all the more necessary that citizens and their representatives alike carry out the work of self-government responsibly.

Detractors and senators should redirect their ire away from Judge Barrett: Democracy does not entail pinning all of our hopes and dreams on nine, black-robed philosopher kings and excoriating them when they fail us. At the end of the day, the many fraught issues of immense moral weight that define American political disagreement today are in our hands.

The judges can and must enforce the baseline protections of the Bill of Rights — and Barrett will do that. But she won’t do much more than that because that’s not her job. It’s our job — which, of course, is why I will be enthusiastically casting my vote for Joe Biden on November 3. It’s our job to have the debates and write the laws that will push this country in a more just direction. And we need to do better. But we need to do better in the political realm — as voters, activists and politicians. The onus is on us and the politicians whom we elect, like Biden, not on judges like Barrett.





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