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Amy Coathanger Barrett and the anti-democratic feedback loop

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A Supreme Court extremely hostile to basic democratic values makes sense, since it was produced by institutions conceived in anti-democratic values:

In 2016, President Trump lost the national popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He lost it by a lot — 2,865,075 votes, to be precise.

Meanwhile, the Senate just voted to confirm Trump’s third nominee to the Supreme Court. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) crossing over to vote with all 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus.

Yet, while pro-Barrett senators control a majority of the Senate, they represent nowhere near a majority of the entire nation. Indeed, the senators who voted against Barrett represent 13,524,906 more people than the senators who voted for her. (I derived this figure using 2019 census estimates of each state’s population. You can check my work using this spreadsheet.)

These two numbers — 2,865,075 and 13,524,906 — should inform how we view the actions Barrett will take now that she is one of the nine most powerful judges in the country. Barrett owes her new job to two of our Constitution’s anti-democratic pathologies.

If every American’s vote counted equally in a presidential election, Hillary Clinton would be president right now and Barrett would still be a law professor at Notre Dame. And if the Senate did not give Wyoming the same number of senators as California — despite the fact that California has more than 68 times as many people as Wyoming — Barrett would not have been confirmed.

All of which makes judicial reform to restore something more like majority rule all the more justifiable.

At least this process produces justices of the utmost integrity and highest levels of intellectual distinction.

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