CNN Lies About Amy Coney Barrett and Even Sen. Schumer Won't Play Along
It must be hard to dig up dirt on a woman like Amy Coney Barrett, the accomplished judge, law professor and Catholic mother of seven who has been nominated to serve on the highest court in the land — but that doesn’t mean the left won’t try.
Barrett’s name had been bandied about as President Donald Trump’s pick to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court prior to his formal announcement Saturday, making her a lightning rod for attacks before it became an official.
Instead of championing her as an ideal of female empowerment, leftists are working overtime to smear Barrett with whatever they think can stick — except one lie that even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer could not go along with.
Usually, the Democratic senator from New York is happily enthralled in a co-dependent relationship with CNN, the establishment media network that is unapologetically opposed to the Trump administration.
But when the eponymous host of CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” served up a softball that Schumer could have easily hit out of the park on Wednesday’s broadcast, he simply took the pitch.
“An unearthed video we found, Senator, from 2016 shows Professor Amy Coney Barrett at the time, now an appeals court judge, obviously, and current favorite to be the president’s Supreme Court pick, she warned of appointments for the Supreme Court that could flip the balance of power,” Burnett said.
Despite the dramatic setup, what Barrett had to say, even out of context, was nowhere near as controversial as how the host sold it.
“We’re talking about Justice Scalia, you know, the staunchest conservative on the court and we’re talking about him being replaced by someone who can dramatically flip the balance of power in the court,” Barrett said in the CBS interview in Feb. 2016 about then-President Barack Obama replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
“It’s not a lateral move,” Barrett said at the end of the edited footage.
Burnett tried to goad Schumer, saying Barrett was “raising a flag, it seems, on making an appointment like this in an election year.”
“So, what do you say to that? Is it going to be important in any hearings?” she pitched to Schumer.
“Well, I’m not going to comment on any prospective nominee for judge before they are nominated,” Schumer said as the meatball just blew past him.
He instead pivoted to complaining about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and predicting a mass extinction for key goodies in the usual Democrat agenda — with abortion clearly among the most important.
“There’s civil rights, and labor union rights, and gay rights and women’s rights, the right to choose. Roe v. Wade could be undone by a court this extreme,” Schumer recited on cue from the leftist playbook.
Burnett tried a different tactic, rolling out another part of Barrett’s old interview, hoping to set up Schumer’s objections to what he calls “hypocrisy” by Senate Republicans.
“It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Senate is willing to push a president’s nominees through in an election year when they share the same political affiliation,” Barrett said in the 2016 footage.
“The president has the power to nominate and the Senate has the power to act or not, and I don’t think either one of them can claim that there’s a rule governing one way or the other.”
Once again, Schumer did not even swing at it, but simply launched into how “Republicans have not stolen one but two Supreme Court justices using abject power, no morality, no honor, no honesty,” unconcerned that he didn’t put forth a shred of supporting evidence (it is CNN, after all).
Maybe even Schumer was able to see that the selected clips of the nominee didn’t support that the host was trying to insinuate — let alone the whole truth — and did not take the bait.
Indeed, while the original interview showed that Barrett spent much of the interview eulogizing Scalia, for whom she clerked, Barrett also explained that there is precedent for nominating and confirming a justice during a presidential election year.
Barrett explained that besides the confirmation of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a nominee of Republican President Ronald Reagan who was confirmed by a Democratic Senate in 1988, five of the six confirmations that took place during election years in the 20th century came about when both the White House and Senate were of the same party.
And even the Kennedy case was unusual in its own way, as Barrett explained. While the confirmation took place in 1988, the Kennedy nomination occurred in 1987, after a tortuous process that included the Democratic torpedoing of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Robert Bork’s nomination and the failure of D.C. Circuit Judge Douglas Ginsburg’s nomination due to marijuana use in the 1970s.
“The vacancy did not arise in the presidential election year,” she explained.
“It arose the year before, in June, when [Justice Lewis] Powell retired. And Justice Kennedy was nominated in November of the prior year. Moreover, he was nominated after Bork’s nomination had failed and Ginsburg withdrew his nomination,” Barrett continued.
“So the wrangling for the spot, the conversation about the spot, the existence of the spot, had been in play for a long time before that.”
It’s only then that she commented about tipping the court by replacing Scalia with a less conservative judge and the challenge that may pose, adding also that party lines have only recently determined whether a judge will be confirmed.
The full context points out the challenges that would face a nominee, not what she thinks about the practice as a whole, or the philosophical balance of the court.
It was about as even-handed as any approach to the topic could be, in fact, and in no way contradicted her approval of Trump’s nomination weeks away from Election Day.
CNN wasn’t the only outlet to try this line of attack as both Business Insider and Newsweek tried to make hay about her characterization of a new nominee possibly “flipping the balance of the court,” which was mostly a comment, on rather than an objection to, nominating a new justice.
Of course, compared to her being called a racist because she adopted black children and having to contend with anti-Catholic bigotry, this lie is tame in a world devoid of journalistic standards for the establishment media bent on simply making conservatives look bad.
They’re worried that Amy Coney Barrett may overturn child murder that her predecessor supported, or maybe they’re just intimidated by the fact that she shatters every fake narrative the left advances about being a woman in America.
The left tells women that being a mother will inhibit their careers (hence the reverence for abortion on demand), let alone having several.
Women are oppressed, leftists contend, with conservative men dreaming about the day when the “The Handmaid’s Tale” becomes reality, yet Barrett has the chance to serve at the pinnacle of the judicial branch of government, having been nominated by their archenemy Trump.
Nevertheless, whatever their true objection to Barrett is, it’s a sad day for the establishment media when even Chuck Schumer won’t go along with their lies.
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