Amy Coney Barrett

Will Amy Coney Barrett save America — or wreck it?

Americans hate the Supreme Court. You wouldn’t think so from a look at the polls, which usually show that the court is far more popular than the elected branches of government. But history tells a very different story. The conservative movement as it exists today was formed in large part as a reaction against the liberalism of the Supreme Court under chief justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger — both of whom were Republicans, as it happens. The progressive movement of the early 20th century and the populist movement of the late 19th century were also spurred to varying degrees by the character of the Supreme Court at the time, which was seen as conservative and elitist. Franklin D.

amy coney barrett

Who’s afraid of Amy Coney Barrett?

Oooff! If you’re to go by Twitter — not always a good idea — there’s one thing not to like about Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s potential nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and that’s her religion: Catholicism. The Washington Post’s Ron Charles quoted her saying that ‘a legal career is but a means to an end...and that end is building the kingdom of God’. Cue for others to pile in to the effect that there’s meant to be a separation of church and state in the US, and others witheringly observing that it’s not far to go from here to overturning Roe v. Wade. You can expect the quote to be widely circulated in the next few days.

amy coney barrett

Bill Barr and the ersatz Papal Octopus

Come on now, The New Yorker. Surely one of Conde Nast’s babies famous for their cartoons should be familiar with the other Nast. Thomas Nast was the father of American cartoon and the progenitor of the conspiratorial renditions of the feared papal insurrection. Nast’s nastiest cartoons were a passionate projection of his virulent anti-Catholic beliefs, hardly unusual in the 19th century among Protestants and ethnocentric nativists, until John F. Kennedy’s era ushered in an amnesia. The American River Ganges, Nast’s 1871 caricature of Catholic bishops as reptiles ominously wading and slithering to the New York shoreline, salivating with ravenous appetites to devour the Protestant schoolteacher and children, was published in Harper’s Weekly not once, but twice!

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