The focus in this entry will not be the extreme poor taste of rushing to nominate someone nor the extreme hypocrisy in Republican Senators voting to confirm someone six weeks before an election when they refused to do it under President Obama when a vacancy occurred a year before an election.
Instead, the focus today is on the threat to LGBT and other civil rights that Trump's nominee, if confirmed, would represent. The media is reporting, as of this writing Friday night, that the selection is Amy Coney Barrett.
Not surprisingly, Barrett ideologically is on the far right and is religiously dogmatic. If confirmed, she could very well be the farthest right on the high court.
Any Trump Supreme Court nominee is a potential threat to LGBT and other civil rights (details here). Barrett, however, is likely even more dangerous because she has steadfastly demonstrated little respect for Supreme Court precedent, or what is known in legal circles as stare decisis (details here).
The English common law system, and the American common law system by extension, are both founded in the bedrock principle of adhering to previous court rulings. This is why Supreme Court rulings, like Obergefell v. Hodges which upheld same-sex marriage, are binding throughout the country once decided. Any law or court ruling that violates or contradicts a Supreme Court precedent, thereafter, is invalid and unenforceable.
Far-right lawyers and judges like Barrett, however, believe that precedent simply can be ignored if they decide the precedent wasn't the "right" decision. So if she wished, she could simply overturn a landmark ruling like Obergefell if it wasn't "right" in her eyes.
Conservatives forever complain about how "liberal" judges allegedly ignore existing law and write their own. In reality, conservatives are the ones who do this and judges like Barrett are at that forefront.
Further, Barrett has strong links to ultra-conservative Catholic organizations with anti-LGBT histories and has spoken before the so-called "Alliance Defending Freedom," an anti-LGBT hate group. She could be very dangerous to all of our futures as a deciding vote on an increasingly theocratic, dogmatic, far-right Supreme Court.
The remedy for this is to vote Trump out of office on November third so he can make no more judicial nominations. The Supreme Court justice with the must vulnerable health now is a conservative, so a Democratic President could bring the high court back to is equilibrium with progressive nominees who aren't trying to turn the country into a Dark Ages theocracy.
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