Amy Coney Barrett’s Confirmation Could Cause a ‘Right to Privacy’ Domino Effect
If there’s no right to privacy, a whole line of rulings goes out the window
If there is one stunningly clear takeaway from the hearings to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, it’s this: Enjoy your rights to bodily sovereignty and sexual privacy while you have them. Because if Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court, they may not last long.
Supreme Court confirmation hearings are often farcical displays. A nominee, chosen from among the finest legal minds in the land and auditioning for a job to write legal opinions that have the power to profoundly shape Americans’ lives, sits before the Senate Judiciary Committee and purports to have few opinions at all on the cases and issues that are the most controversial and oft-discussed inside the legal academy and out of it. But Barrett brings the dissembling and disingenuous refusal to answer direct questions to a new level. No Supreme Court nominee in memory has been so evasive. And where Barrett hedges the most are the biggest tells: on the Affordable Care Act, on presidential powers in elections, and on reproductive rights and sexual privacy.
Barrett was hand-picked by conservative organizations because, among other things, she is against the right to…
