“Just to state this,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, “Justice Kennedy’s son gave a billion dollar loan to Trump when no one would give him a dime, and Justice Kennedy has been ruling in favor of the Trump Administration position for 2 years as the Court decides 5-4 case after 5-4 case.”
This was crazy conspiracy theory completely ungrounded in facts. Still, 21,600 Twitter users spread the lie promulgated by a well-respected matron of the progressive movement. The conspiracy was somehow that because the bank where Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son works loaned money to a Donald Trump Jr. business, President Trump was able to force or entice Kennedy to retire. It made no sense.
It was fact-free fearmongering. And so it was a perfect kickoff to the progressive movement’s efforts in the wake of Kennedy’s retirement.
Dishonesty is ever-present in the political fray. Factual errors crop up everywhere. But the truth rarely seems to take a beating as much when a Supreme Court seat is up for grabs. Falsity is particularly ubiquitous this time because of the sense that Kennedy might be replaced by someone who could overturn Roe v. Wade.
The main target of liberal lies in the past week have been, unsurprisingly, a conservative Christian woman: Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
“As a judge,” wrote CAP’s Twitter account, @WhyCourtsMatter, “Barrett sided against an African American worker in favor of a company’s ‘separate-but-equal arrangement,’ flying in the face of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Now, she’s up for a seat on our nation’s highest court.”
That sounds bad, right? It’s also another example of this premier progressive group attempting to blatantly mislead readers amid this fight.
First off — and this seems relevant — Barrett didn’t rule on the case in question. That was a different female judge on the court, Diane Sykes. Barrett joined the majority of the court in refusing to grant a rehearing.
A quick examination of the case reveals its frivolity. While the allegation is that AutoZone segregates its shops by race, the facts of the case were this: A black worker at AutoZone was transferred, at his own request, by a black manager, to another AutoZone, with no loss of pay or benefits.
No serious person could consider Barrett’s minor role in this case even the slightest hint of racism or racial insensitivity. But CAP does. Now CAP isn’t some fringe group. Washington Post writers cite their research as authority and call CAP “the most prominent Democrat-aligned think tank.”
The NAACP joined in this AutoZone attack along with groups such as the Alliance for Justice.
The Alliance for Justice was the root of another lie about Barrett. “Stunningly,” the group wrote of Barrett, “Barrett has asserted that judges should not follow the law or the Constitution when it conflicts with their personal religious beliefs. In fact, Barrett has said that judges should be free to put their personal views ahead of their judicial oath to faithfully follow the law.”
Barrett actually argued the exact opposite. Literally, the attack misprepresented her opinion by 180 degrees. She and her co-author John Garvey suggested in the paper that a judge who holds the view articulated by many popes that the death penalty is immoral might have to recuse himself or herself on a death penalty case. In other words, she argued that judges can never let their faith override the rule of law.
Still, this lie about Barrett spread, and Democratic senators picked it up. This lie was the launching pad for a veiled attack on Barrett’s faith from Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California: “The dogma lives loudly within you.”
A common lie that will catch fire if Trump nominates Barrett for the court is that she belongs to an extremist cult. The mostly Catholic religious group she belongs to, People of Praise, is no cult, and every honest expert who has piped up on it says as much.
The lies about Barrett are just one example of a torrent of lies these days. Undergirding the whole debate is a bigger lie, in which not only liberal activists and commentators are implicated, but which the mainstream media — presumably through ignorance — is spreading.
The big lie here is that Roe v. Wade is a venerable precedent with wide support. On the public opinion front, many outlets uncritically report the meaningless finding that 60 percent of Americans do not want to see Roe overturned. The fact is, 90 percent of Americans, and a high percentage of reporters who write about this matter, don’t know what Roe did.
For instance, Roe doesn’t allow states to pass laws to protect second-trimester babies in utero. Only 28 percent of Americans believe abortion “should generally be legal” in the second trimester, according to Gallup polling.
Plenty of surveys suggest that most Americans don’t support what Roe did. And if you review the legal scholarship on Roe, you find broad cross-ideological consensus that it was a horrible, politically motivated, indefensible position.
You won’t pick that up in most media coverage of this Supreme Court. In general, these days, the truth will be hard to find.
