The FRONTLINE Interviews
Carrie Johnson
Justice Correspondent, NPR
Carrie Johnson is a justice correspondent for NPR and has reported extensively on the U.S. Department of Justice. She was previously a writer for The Washington Post.
This interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder on October 26, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
It's really a shock to Washington, and in many ways there's a mushroom cloud that sort of goes up in Washington about this news, right?In some ways people expected it, of course, but this is—I think the timing of it is what is so incredibly shocking.Can you help me understand the significance of that moment, when the news breaks?
I think for many people who care about the law, and even women who care about women's rights, there had been a sense of foreboding.They had just thought that Justice Ginsburg would be able to hang on, hang on until after the election, hang on until January, hang on for some months beyond.She had beaten cancer.She had fought so hard.And then to hear that she had died so close to a presidential election, and having shared through her granddaughter her "most fervent wish" that the next president be the one to replace her, came as an enormous shock, and an enormous sense of sadness to people, even people who had not met her.
The images of women and their daughters standing outside in Washington, driving from states all over the country during a pandemic to pay their respects to this pioneer was enormously meaningful and enormously touching.
You touch on this period of grief and grieving on the Democrats' side, certainly Democratic women.But I also wonder if you can help us understand the kind of bracing and the crouching position that many of them were in as they anticipated a GOP response.Can you help me understand that?
Well, on the same day that Justice Antonin Scalia died, Mitch McConnell came out and said that he wasn't going to move any of President Obama's nominees, any candidate that Obama put down.And certainly the expectation was that the Trump administration, which had been hankering for another nominee, would move very, very quickly to install a new justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with somebody, in some ways, who was her polar opposite ideologically.And the only question was, who was that going to be, and how quickly was it going to happen?
And what happens next?
The nation mourns for Justice Ginsburg.People take to the streets.People drive to D.C. to pay their respects.And then President Trump says, "I'm not going to announce a nominee until after some of the funeral services for Justice Ginsburg are held."And of course there's an enormously moving though sparsely attended service at the Supreme Court, and another short service at the Congress.And within—within a very short period of time thereafter, a week to the day after her death, it leaks out that President Trump is going to select Amy Coney Barrett, an Indiana judge on the 7th Circuit, who's deeply conservative.
McConnell’s Decision to Fill the Ginsburg Seat
Really, the night of the news breaking of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, Mitch McConnell makes it clear that his position is to advance a nominee.Can you tell me about the significance of that announcement, certainly the timing?Help me understand that tone he sets.
Mitch McConnell wanted to send a message not just to Republicans in the Senate but to people all over the country that this was an opportunity he had wanted to seize, perhaps for his entire career, and he was going to seize it now, and that opportunity was to place a third Trump justice on the Supreme Court, to finally shift the majority of the court to a solid 6-to-3 conservative majority.
What's at stake for him in this moment, this opening on the court?It seems to be, as you referenced, the true epitome of his lifelong crusade, but help me understand how significant this moment is.
You don't need to be a mind reader.Mitch McConnell comes out and says it.He says that no matter which way this election goes, and it may not go well for President Trump and the Republicans, that it's going to take a long, long time for them—Democrats—to undo what Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump have done to the Supreme Court.
This is a bit of reporting I don't have and I wonder if you do, which is, do you happen to know if Mitch McConnell views, attends any of the funeral events related to Justice Ginsburg?
No, he was not at the Supreme Court as far as I know, and I'm certain he was not at the congressional service.In fact, I think there may have been only one Republican at the congressional service, and none of the Republican congressional leaders showed up for the service, which was viewed really as a sign of disrespect by Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi.
What does it tell you about where we are?
Washington, in a lot of ways, is broken, and that divide between the parties, which has been big for years, is as big a chasm as I've seen in my lifetime here.
Holding Open the Scalia Seat
It's really an incredible moment.
OK, we've got to go back into the Obama administration for a moment, and I think you know exactly where I'm going next, which is an event you referenced already: Justice Scalia's passing in February of '16, nine months before that election.Can you tell me how Mitch McConnell responds to the news that day?
This was an enormous period.Justice Scalia has died; he's found dead in his bed.This was totally unexpected for most of the country.People had not known—it was not public—that he had suffered from health conditions.And it took a while for the news to leak out.It happened in Texas.Well, within a few hours, Mitch McConnell comes out and says, "We are not going to advance any nominee President Obama puts forward."And that's the night of a Republican presidential debate.And so Mitch McConnell gets out in front of the debate and communicates that message to all the Republicans in the party.And very soon, people like Ted Cruz of Texas, very conservative, really advance McConnell's line, and it becomes, more or less, a blockade, blockade of whomever President Obama's going to nominate for that seat.
What's he doing to the court in that moment?What is he doing to the atmosphere?
Well, in drawing a red line, Mitch McConnell is certainly defining the key issues for himself and his party, but he's also setting up yet another barrier to the Obama presidency, which he had vowed early on he was going to fight by hook or by crook.And some people would argue it was continuing a path of politicization of the court that dates back to the Robert Bork era.Other people would argue, Democrats, that this was a stolen seat, that basically he was setting up an opportunity to steal a seat from the Democratic president.
Can you literally break down for me the argument that he makes about the election year?
This is confusing, because since then, of course, he's changed the terms of the argument.But Mitch McConnell basically says: "We're too close to an election, and it's up to the American people to decide in the election.And then the next president can go ahead and make that nomination."And this is an argument he sticks to.He sticks to it so hard that very few Republicans even meet with President Obama's eventual nominee, Merrick Garland.Of course he reverses his position after the death of Justice Ginsburg, right, and in that case he says, "There's been a change, and the change is that Republicans control both the White House and the Senate, and they're going to seize the moment."Democrats view that as a sham, a charade and worse.
He says at the time that this is a precedent, and what Nina Totenberg told us in our original broadcast, there was no precedent for this.Was there?What was the response to this?
I'm not aware of any like incident in modern history, for sure.
And it was kind of gobsmacking, in part because the nominee President Obama eventually chose, Merrick Garland, is among the most highly qualified and respected lawyers in Washington, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican.It was just shocking that most senators refused to meet with him on the Republican side of the aisle.
Help me understand that, because a couple do, right?Jeff Flake does.I think Susan Collins talked to us about how he was a moderate choice, but I can't remember if she actually met with him or not.But what had changed in Washington that somebody like Garland created, again, these—not that he created it, but that Mitch McConnell had succeeded in creating those red lines?Help me understand what had happened.
This was kind of a bizarre moment, right, because people, some people on the left thought President Obama should go big and choose a nominee who would really activate and energize some base of the Democratic voting bloc—an African American woman, for example; another Latina to the court.And President Obama wanted to be safe, and so he selected Merrick Garland, whom somebody like Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, Republican who's been around for a long time, said, "Oh, sure, we'd confirm Merrick Garland."Push comes to shove, most Republicans won't even take a meeting with Merrick Garland.It was an enormous shock to the legal establishment, to the Obama White House, and an enormous source of frustration.
But they just didn't get anywhere.
What didn't Obama get about McConnell in that moment?
That Mitch McConnell knew how to use every lever of power at his disposal, and he could keep his Republicans in the Senate in line, no question about it.
Yeah, he even threatens several of them around this time period.It is incredible to see the influence that he has over that caucus at this moment.
The Democrats seem to not have the same sense of fear.
The Kavanaugh Hearings
… If we can fast-forward a bit in our Supreme Court history.
In many ways, the Kavanaugh hearings are an incredible turning point in how we nominate a Supreme Court justice.Can you give me a sense, a little bit, of the lay of the land, in terms of why is this a changing point?Why is this a turning point for Dems, for Republicans?And I'm specifically thinking about the end of the hearings themselves.
Those hearings had become such a source of drama and frustration.The interruptions by protesters, the arrests of people dragged screaming out of the room, the introduction toward the end of allegations of sexual harassment and even worse against the justice, and then Kavanaugh's just remarkable, fiery, indignant, sometimes vitriolic towards the Democrats on the committee response: I had not seen anything like that in my time here.And, you know, it really left a lot of older members of the Judiciary Committee thrown for a loop.Democrats were sort of disgusted and saddened.Republicans like Lindsey Graham were enraged and vowed that nothing like this was ever going to happen again if he became chairman of the committee.And of course, he eventually did.
… He does during these current hearings make a reference to “These are the way.” Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Lindsey Graham said, at the start of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, that he did not want to see a repeat of what happened with Brett Kavanaugh, and he wanted people to act with decorum and not get the proceedings derailed.And for a large part, he succeeded; he succeeded because there is a pandemic, and protesters were not allowed in the room, for one thing.He succeeded because Dianne Feinstein, his Democratic counterpart, took a less hostile approach to the proceedings than many Democrats and many Democratic voters wanted to see.And it became a source of enormous controversy when, at the end of this four days, Lindsey Graham and Dianne Feinstein embraced in a hug.
That was not the message that most Democrats who care about the Supreme Court wanted to see their party communicating.
That doesn't represent the battle that I think many folks feel, right?
I think Lindsey Graham also says, "This is the way it's supposed to go," right?"This is the way it's supposed to look."There is sort of this reference back to the Kavanaugh hearings, and again, to just, you know, anyway, to describe sort of what has changed or how we’ve evolved or how we haven't, how these partisan battles have, anyway, just become magnified.
Let me ask you a little bit about—you referenced when Kavanaugh comes back in those hearings to defend himself in such a political and vitriolic way.… Actually from day one, when Senator [Kamala] Harris interrupts the chairman, [it appears] that these nominations would become full-on political battles, that these were sort of wars being waged by parties, not over content and qualifications and careers, but in fact over each party's view of what the court should look like and what the country should look like.Does that sound true to you?
I think that's right.I mean, the Brett Kavanaugh—the very angry Brett Kavanaugh we all saw—is someone many of his friends told me privately they had never seen before.That's not the way he generally operated in Washington, in the Bush White House, in his other jobs, or even on the federal appeals court here in Washington, where he sat as a judge.That was an unusual moment they thought spurred on by counsel from White House lawyer Don McGahn and maybe spurring about what the president wanted him to see and do and say that afternoon.You know, generally speaking, most of the modern Supreme Court nominees have gone to elite law schools, have done the requisite clerkships on the court.They've then gotten important jobs in law firms and government.These are people who are somewhat already vetted, so the notion that we would be fighting scorched-earth battles about them is a little odd, because they tend to come from a rather elite and privileged set of circumstances and have been kind of helped along the way by mentors in law school and private practice and the like.
… I think understanding, again, the atmosphere and what had transformed since those earlier hearings.They were incredibly controversial.They were incredibly ugly at times, but there was something different about this moment.So much of it was Kavanaugh fighting back, right?
Yeah, so much of it was Kavanaugh fighting back … using the Clarence Thomas blueprint, both in terms of his style and to some extent his substance, some of the same words, too, right?
But since then, you know, the rise of the Federalist Society and the rise of interest groups on the left and the right that are pouring tens of millions of dollars into campaigns to either confirm or block these nominees, there is big money behind this, and that big money can pay for a lot of protests, a lot of negative ads, and a lot of conversations with lawmakers leaning on them to treat the nominee in a certain way.
… I wonder if I can ask you now to jump back in some ways to the Amy Coney Barrett—I should say the night of Justice Ginsburg's death and the night that McConnell suggests that he's going to hold hearings, that the Senate will move forward.Can you help us understand the hypocrisy in that decision, 45 days before the election, in light of our conversation earlier about the way things went with Judge Garland?
… So the notion that Mitch McConnell would say "all systems go" to any Trump nominee little over a month before people started voting in the presidential election struck a lot of Democrats as the height of hypocrisy, since he refused to act for something like nine months when it came to Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee.And that was only four years earlier.I mean, reporters like me very quickly went on social media, went on the C-SPAN website and found footage and voices of these senators from four years prior saying something exactly opposite of what they were saying now.Lindsey Graham actually said, "You can use my words against me," and people did.
… There was this reference to, well, if it's one-party rule that—in fact, that rule, the Garland precedent, is no longer relevant.Help me understand that.Help me understand sort of what he's doing, what McConnell is doing in that moment when he defends his decision.
McConnell basically comes out and says that: "Listen, we control all the levers of power.We have the White House, we have the Senate, and we're going to get this done.We have the votes, and it's up to you, Democrats, to prove otherwise."And he made a bet that they just couldn't do it.And they couldn't.
In many ways, is this the culmination of his life's work?It is kind of remarkable to see how he does this last, sort of, most recent nominee but this last, sort of, judge.
You know, this nomination has come at a time when the nation is gripped by the coronavirus pandemic.
Two members of the Judiciary Committee actually test positive after the Rose Garden unveiling event for Amy Coney Barrett, the president's nominee.And still Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will not press pause on these hearings.They say senators can take part virtually.
They say—one Republican congressman, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, actually says, "If I have to be wheeled in in a moon suit, I'm going to be there to vote."Meanwhile, Democrats are out there arguing: There has been no relief, no new relief package for people who are suffering and ill because of the coronavirus or have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic.What the Republicans care about, they say, is the Supreme Court justice, and that's where Republicans have put all of their energy in the run-up to the election.
When you think about the moon suit, when you think about Mitch McConnell not attending the event at the White House out of a precaution, he said, safety, what does it tell you about the drive and the cadence that they are committed to right now, or several weeks ago?
This was a march, and the march began with the death of Justice Ginsburg.And 30 days after President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump and Mitch McConnell will have secured a third Supreme Court justice.It's an enormous accomplishment.
How fast is that?Can you give us a sense of that?
You know, people at the Congressional Research Service who study this say, on average, it usually takes about 68, 69 days.This was less than half of that in an election year, in the midst of a pandemic.It's unbelievable.I've never seen Congress get anything done so quickly.
… I wonder if I can ask you about the hearings themselves.Her views are very much on display.We know them.They're well reported.She's been open in the past about them.And I guess what I'm interested in knowing is that there is no interest here in winning over the other side, in lobbying this nominee with Dems.Can you help me again understand how far we've come from Bork to Amy Coney Barrett in how the—again, how those hearings are structured?
Well, the irony is delicious, right?Robert Bork talks about the "intellectual feast."At the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, we got maybe a bowl of cereal.She actually was not very forthcoming about many of the issues that Democrats wanted to know.She didn't talk about climate change.She wouldn’t talk about immigration.She really wouldn’t even talk much about abortion or health care issues.We didn't get that kind of back-and-forth, that kind of intellectual push-and-pull.
She basically said, "I'm not giving you any forecasts or previews," and she stuck very firmly to that position throughout the hearing.
So instead, we got questions from Democrats trying to, you know, as Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota said, "Follow the tracks of her prior writings."Well, you know, she signed an ad talking about the “barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade.” That must mean something, combined with the fact that she's a devout Catholic.But the nominee refused to go most of the places that Democrats wanted to take her.And it became so strange that, by the end of the hearings, Republicans were using their time to make speeches, not even to ask the nominee any legitimate questions.
This seemed to be the Thomas playbook in many ways: Say as little as possible, based off of the experience of Bork, but say as little as possible.
She really did stick to her position.She didn't say much at all.She said she didn't have an agenda.She said that judges should not make policy.She said that's the job of people who are elected, "not me."And she answered some questions on the margins, but she basically kept a very firm hand, and she only answered what she wanted to answer.
Rubber-Stamp Hearings
Which begs the question: Why are we doing these hearings if they are becoming a rubber stamp?Tell me how far again we've come since Bork, which felt to be more of a process; this feels like more of a transaction.
Well, every once in a while in these hearings, you'd get some incredible surprise.You'd get some revealing moment.John Roberts showed that he, you know, can parry with lawmakers the way that a Fred Astaire could dance.Elena Kagan showed us that she's enormously funny, and she actually charmed and disarmed people like Lindsey Graham and some Republicans on the committee.I don't know if you remember, but she made a joke about, "Like all good Jews, I spend Christmas Eve eating Chinese food."And we really learned something about this woman.
With Brett Kavanaugh, we learned something else, in part mostly because of his response to Christine Ford's testimony.But with Amy Coney Barrett, she came in with a blank notebook, and she presented herself in a certain way, and we didn't get much sense of her as a person, beyond the fact that she has seven kids and is very devoted to her family and her work.There wasn't any kind of surprise or revelatory moment of the sort that you'd expect for somebody who's getting confirmed to a lifetime-tenure position.
And it was just sort of an, "All right, moving along here."That was even sort of the view that Democrats had in some way.There were, of course, attempts to challenge her and make their own speeches, but really, it was the arms, in some ways, were laid down on both sides.It wasn't the battle, in some ways, that I think we expected.
Mitch McConnell had the votes from start to finish.He knew it, and he behaved that way all along.
There was a certainty in this process that just looked a lot different.Let me ask you a little bit about when Senator [Sheldon] Whitehouse vows to seek revenge for this moment.We kind of look at it as a bit of a mirror image to the speech that a young Senator McConnell makes after the Bork hearings.
Can you help me sort of understand what maybe the Dems have now been struck by and perhaps what could be to come, kind of the boomerang effect of this moment?
Well, over the last few years, finally, Democratic interest groups have cropped up, trying to get voters to focus on courts, because historically, Republican voters, conservative voters care a lot about this, but Democrats can be single-issue voters, and those issues are so diverse, they never really coalesce around the idea of the Supreme Court.This time was a little different, in part because it was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who died, and she was so beloved and such a symbol, and in part because some of these Democratic groups that have been growing now for a few years have become more mature.They're able to mobilize voters and protesters and attract Democratic senators to their rallies outside the court and elsewhere.And there is a sense that the court plays a huge role in the daily lives of most people in a way that they don't even understand; they're starting to understand that now.And I think Senator Whitehouse was trying to communicate that, you know, we've been fighting this battle over the court with one hand tied behind our back for a long time, and we're not going to do that anymore, and I don't want to hear any complaining about it when we begin to act the way you have acted for a long time.
It sounds like—I think about the millions of dollars that were raised on the night of RBG's death for Democratic Senate candidates.I think about sort of an arms race on the left that we maybe haven't seen before.Is that an overstatement?Do you see a coming wave?
No, I think it's—I think it's enormously powerful that Democrats are raising money off of this, and donations from regular people all over the country, not just big-money types on the East and West Coasts.
It's a different kind of environment than it used to be.But to some extent, the Democratic institutions have not yet caught up to what the Federalist Society has been doing so successfully for 30 years or more.
… Senator McConnell gave a pretty impassioned speech yesterday that you've already reported on.And I wonder if you can help me understand the argument he makes about changing the court for generations.
Amy Coney Barrett is 48 years old.She could sit on the court for 30 or more years.Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are pretty young themselves.And so the notion that McConnell and Trump now have three youngish and very conservative nominees on this court presents a legacy for both of them that will last long after they leave Washington.And it will matter an enormous amount to business interests, to women and reproductive rights, to the scope of presidential power, no matter who's in charge of the White House, not to mention how McConnell and Trump have stacked the lower courts with sometimes even younger judges, some of them enormously controversial.The Trump judges are different in kind than the judges that were appointed by George W. Bush.They're iconoclastic in some ways.They're deeply conservative, and they don't shy away from a fight, just like President Trump doesn't.
And it just seems to be the realization of a legacy and a crusade that goes beyond this president.As you referenced so well, he taps into this Federalist Society movement, taps into the passion that Mitch McConnell has had for this issue for so long.This is an extraordinary period we're in, to see the reimagination of the judiciary in Mitch McConnell's eyes.
Yeah.
One of the odd things about the last few years is how President Trump—and to some extent, other Republicans—have turned on John Roberts, who is in most cases still a very reliable and very conservative fellow.And so the notion that you have taken the Roberts court, as they like to say, and made it the Clarence Thomas court for the foreseeable future is an enormous achievement for conservatives.
Let me ask you a little bit about the uniqueness; that is, a member of the legislature having this amount of influence over the judiciary—I'm obviously speaking about Mitch McConnell—so much so that, as, in his own words, he says this movement is more important than, in fact, legislative achievement.
Yeah, the last few years Congress has not gotten very much done at all, except for judges, and not just three Supreme Court justices, but over 50 appeals court judges and many, many more lower-court judges.And that's the pipeline.That's the pipeline that Mitch McConnell has been interested in for decades now, and he has filled most of those posts.
Yeah, he's done it.He's become successful, even if it's risked his own seats in the Senate in this particular cycle we're in now.
He's got his eyes on a long game, and it's playing out exactly the way he intended it to.
But that ganging up of branches over one another, it's pretty unusual to our democracy.
A lot of people on the left and on the right side of the political aisle now think the only way to resolve some of this tension is to make the Supreme Court less political, in a way.Either you add more justices, you impose term limits on the justices who are there, or you pass legislation to strip the court of jurisdiction over certain issues to try to make the court less political and less politicized than it has become.
… One thing I do want to get, because you kind of referenced this: Do you think these courts are out of step with the country?
Interestingly enough, even as President Trump and some Republicans railed against John Roberts over the last couple of years, before the death of Justice Ginsburg, public opinion polls rated the Supreme Court much higher than the other branches of government in Washington.The Supreme Court was basically operating the way the vast majority of American people want it to operate.That was before this latest, very difficult and contentious nomination process.And I'm not sure what's going to happen to public confidence in the courts, depending on how the election goes and how that's resolved.
I do wonder if you can help me.You allude to the election, but long-term consequences of maybe playing off of Senator Whitehouse's interest in sort of kicking this up a notch and a longer arms war over the courts.Help me understand that, what's at stake.
You know, as Amy Coney Barrett said in her hearings, the Supreme Court doesn't have an army or a police force to force people to listen to what it says.Really, the only tool that the court has is its legitimacy, is the fact that the public believes generally in what it does, and it believes in the court as an institution.
And if something happens to shatter that legitimacy, if politics intrudes so deeply into the nominations and confirmations process, the court could be damaged institutionally.I think John Roberts has worried about that over the years, and this could be another moment where public confidence in the court is really at risk.
… The politics have just taken over this process in a way that I think we thought the same at the time of Bork; we thought at the same at the time of Thomas; we thought the same at the time of Kavanaugh.But now this is, sort of, I don't know—there's something unique about this, the pace of it, the sort of, in many cases, the Dems' inability to stop it.There was really no attempt at that.
Democrats tried, right?They didn't show up for the committee vote.Instead, they held a rally outside, and they put up posters of people suffering from illness to try to rally support around the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.But Republicans just kept going.They just kept going.Democrats did what Mitch McConnell calls "dilatory tactics" to waste time, to try to make it cost a little bit more for the Republicans.They were in session all weekend, all night on Sunday.That's a little bit hard for the Senate, which consists of a lot of 70- and sometimes 80-year-old people, right, to be in session all night.But that didn't slow the conservatives down.They still got what they wanted in the end.
I just wonder about if we can imagine the election resulting in perhaps the loss of the Senate majority, what Mitch McConnell will think about that compared to what he's accomplished here.
Mitch McConnell has been single-minded about the court and the courts for many years.He's now cemented a conservative majority on the court, a 6-to-3 conservative majority for possibly a generation or longer.And if he loses his senate majority leader seat, I think he'll believe that was a price that was worth it.
Cost of doing business.
Well, he's basically said, "Things we do here in Senate, other things, can be undone with a new president, new members, but the Supreme Court takes a lot, lot longer to undo."
One of the scenes we'll probably do, and there's lots of footage of it, and it's a remarkable moment, is the announcement at the White House, what later people called the superspreader event.
It would be great to have just some more detail on who is there, what does it mean to the people who are gathered there, at that moment, in the midst of a pandemic and an election—but the sort of luminaries of the party all gathered there.Just to help us understand what is going on in that moment, why it's important, who's there, what's going on.
It is hard to overstate how excited conservatives are about the selection of Amy Coney Barrett.
I mean, you had Utah senator Mike Lee running around in the Rose Garden, hugging and kissing people.
You had the attorney general, Bill Barr.You had former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
All the president's allies who are sort of in the elite legal circles in Washington, people from the Heritage Foundation—it was a sense of delight and glee.They knew exactly what they were getting in Amy Coney Barrett.They had planned for this moment.And this was really an enormous celebration of a lot of work they had put in over a lot of years.
Also at that moment, how important was that seat, that particular seat?Because we'll have seen Kavanaugh, and they'll say that it was important to get the Kavanaugh seat, but what did this seat represent to those people there?
This seat represented what people in Washington call a pickup on the Hill, right?It was a solidly liberal justice exchanged for a solidly conservative justice, both women, but polar opposites in many ways.And so this really cements a conservative majority and shifts the power, the power center at the court, from John Roberts rightward.Amy Coney Barrett is more conservative than John Roberts.She's probably more conservative in some ways than Brett Kavanaugh is.
This is going to mean important things for the court, moving forward, in how it rules on big issues.
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