This Is What It Feels Like to Live Under Minority Rule

When Judge Amy Coney Barrett was being vetted for her lifetime position on the highest court in the land, she declined to answer even straightforward questions about presidential powers and voter intimidation. She declined to give serious responses to the follow-up Senate questionnaires probing even the simplest legal issues. She would not say, for instance, whether it’s a crime to vote twice, or whether Article II allows Trump to “do whatever I want,” or whether a judge’s ethnic or racial heritage constitutes bias. She wouldn’t answer questions about whether women seeking to terminate their pregnancies could face capital punishment.

The refusal to answer even the simplest yes/no questions about what black letter law means, and who it binds, has the effect—intentional or not—of unsettling what was once widely accepted and understood. It’s the judicial equivalent of “flooding the zone with shit“ and the result is the same when it’s done in law as it is when it’s done in media—it renders all that was known to be certain as indeterminate and up for grabs. It puts us all at the mercy of powerful deciders and consolidates the power to decide those newly open questions in an authority figure. It recalibrates both truth and power as emanating from someone else.