CT Blue

How deluded do you have to be to snare a guest spot on the New York Times op-ed page?

Today we are treated to an op-ed by Melissa Murray, who is a professor of law at New York University. It seems fairly clear that Professor Murray is unaware of the political developments taking place over the last 30 years or so. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

Much has been made in recent days of the racial and gender diversity that President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would add to the Supreme Court. But there has been surprisingly little discussion of the fact that she would join Justice Amy Coney Barrett as the court’s second working mother.

Two years ago, when Justice Barrett was nominated, her status as a working mother was invoked by her Republican supporters as additional evidence of her fitness for the court. At her confirmation hearings, she was praised as “a walking example of how young children and demanding work can coexist.”

She goes on with a lot of drivel about how the Democrats should be using this as an argument to garner support for Jackson’s nomination.

Let’s put aside the fact that one’s status as a mother truly is irrelevant in considering one’s qualifications for a Supreme Court judgeship. In Barrett’s case, her “motherhood” was more a sign of religious fanaticism than anything else.

Professor Murray, like so many members of the punditocracy, actually seems to believe that some Republicans might be swayed to vote for Jackson if the same argument they deployed for Barrett were deployed for Jackson. To which one must truly ask, where has the professor been for the past 30 years or so? The Republicans have already shamelessly argued that there’s really no hurry to confirm Jackson, and whyever are the Democrats in such a hurry when surely we should be collegial about these sorts of things. Does she really think the response to a motherhood argument would be anything other than scorn? Hasn’t she noticed that hypocrisy is the standard operating procedure for the Republican Party, enabled by a media (the Times being a prime offender) that has decided that since this type of behavior is normal for Republicans it’s hardly worth commenting on, much less condemning, while any such thing coming from a Democrat will be roundly and repeatedly condemned.

This is one time when I am definitely with the Democrats. Expect no Republican support for Jackson. Push her through as quickly as you can. You might call out Republican hypocrisy but don’t really bother to try to convert any of them. The more you try, the less success you will have. All you really have to worry about is Manchin and Sinema.