How Conservatives Really Feel About Amy Coney Barrett
Ben Sasse is worried. With 22 days to go before the election, the Nebraska senator and his colleagues are about to begin a showdown over the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, which he likened to the deadly 19th-century feuds between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Barrett’s confirmation hearings, which begin today, will likely become a spectacle of the intense partisanship—Sasse described it as “WWE slap-down tribalism”—that now characterizes all Supreme Court nomination fights. Perhaps most troubling, Barrett’s potential ascension is coming at a time of crisis for American democratic norms. President Donald Trump has consistently cast doubt on the integrity of November’s election by spreading conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots, suggesting that the election should be postponed, and refusing to say that he’ll agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. “All of those are mistakes by the president,” Sasse told me. “Right now, I think there are a whole bunch of arsonists in Washington, D.C., who don’t think about the public trust.”
Among conservatives in Washington, Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination is almost universally viewed as a win. In their eyes, she’s everything conservatives could. And yet, for all of the good these conservatives believe Barrett will do for America, at least some of them acknowledge that they paid a price for her nomination: Her name will always be tied to Trump’s, and to the erosion of democratic norms he has accelerated. For now, the Republican Party has largely accepted this trade-off. Although Sasse of making skeptical comments about Trump, sentiments like his are rarely expressed on the record by Senate Republicans. But when Trump is gone, whether in four months or four years, conservatives will be left to wrestle with deep disagreements about how the movement got here, and what comes next. For those who loathe the fruit of the Trump era, Barrett makes some of the damage worth it. “The cake is already baked,” one senior Hill staffer told me. “At least you get a judge out of it.”
