Will the Confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett Usher in the Beginning of the Thomas Court

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Last evening, Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as an Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court.

To say that the nomination and confirmation were controversial is perhaps an understatement. Coney Barrett is an orthodox Roman Catholic and opponent of infanticide; she succeeds Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a reliable vote for Moloch’s interests and most other forms of deviant behavior. The confirmation took place in the shadow of a presidential election that is viewed as an existential one by many of us.

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While it is safe to say that no one knows how a Justice will vote once they are seated on the Supreme Court, Coney Barrett’s writings, background, and decisions while on the Seventh Circuit give us great hope that she will be a justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia.

When she was sworn in, Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath.

This not only provoked some howls of outrage from the left.

Yes, I know that Schmidt styles himself as something other than the pathetic loser he really is, but if he isn’t on the left, there is no longer a left in this country.

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There may have been some low-level trolling going on in the bargain.

And there was definitely payback:

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Wait. How could Thomas now be de facto Chief Justice?

I don’t think any of us have been terribly enamored with the performance of Chief Justice John Roberts. From his initial betrayal of the law to salvage ObamaCare, his behavior has been more and more akin to someone seeking the plaudits of the mainstream media and Democrat power structure than those of a man devoted to the preservation of the Constitution. Recently Roberts has acted to save DACA; he’s refused to allow Second Amendment cases to come before the court; he’s been hostile to challenges to abortion; he ruled in favor of Nevada’s Democrat establishment in allowing casinos to have greater rights to operate than churches; and, he voted to recognize sexual proclivity as a protected class under federal employment law.

His public feud with President Trump over his very mundane observation that judges appointed by Barack Obama were carrying out what appeared to be an organized campaign of lawfare against the administration seemed designed to curry favor with the left and build his Resistance bonafides. Read:

Chuck Schumer’s Support Chief Justice Roberts Looks More Like He Agrees With President Trump On the Judiciary

No less a source than fivethirtyeight.com has documented how Roberts’s voting pattern is looking very much like that of Anthony Kennedy. In fact, again, according to fivethirtyeight.com, Roberts voted with Kagan just as often as he did with Alito.

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On the other side of the spectrum, we have a cohesive four justice bloc–Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas–that seems to have few qualms about upholding the Constitution even if a few sacred cows turn into hamburger in the process. Thomas appears to be providing the potential targets. For instance, he laid out a roadmap for bringing the political and viewpoint censorship by tech companies under control.

With a fifth conservative justice and a plea for relevant cases, Thomas could make this happen. Thomas has voted with the minority on abortion cases. Coney Barrett could make Thomas’s opinions the law of the land. If Thomas does, in fact, end up as leading the winning voting coalition, as the senior justice, he decides who writes the opinion.

Again, one doesn’t know how much opinions are driven by knowing they are the minority, and one doesn’t know how justices may vote when the dynamic on the court changes. But, if past is prologue, we may have just seen the end of the Roberts Court and the beginning of the Thomas Court, and the only way Roberts will have any relevance will be to vote with the five conservative justices.

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