Pete Buttigieg delivered a powerful response to Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s opening statement ahead of her U.S. Senate confirmation hearings.
Barrett, a social conservative with a history of anti-LGBTQ statements, was nominated by Donald Trump to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.
LGBTQ advocates have warned that she will attempt to “dismantle” LGBTQ rights and Democrats have described Republican attempts to jam through her nomination before the election as “shameful.”
Ahead of the confirmation hearings, which began today, Oct. 12, Barrett issued the transcript of her opening statement to the Senate, and said that courts “have a vital responsibility to enforce the rule of law.”
“Courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life,” she added. “The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the People. The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try.”
Barrett’s words echo those of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who recently argued that the Supreme Court had bypassed the democratic process in its 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.
Her opening statement transcript was released while Buttigieg, the openly gay former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and former Democratic presidential candidate, was giving an interview on MSNBC’s AM Joy.
Buttigieg was speaking about National Coming Out Day, but was asked to give his opinion on Barrett’s statement, Out reports.
“This is what nominees do,” Buttigieg said. “They write the most seemingly unobjectionable, dry stuff. But really what I see in there is a pathway to judicial activism cloaked in judicial humility.”
He continued: “At the end of the day, rights in this country have been expanded because courts have understood what the true meaning of the letter of the law and the spirit of the constitution is. That is not about time-traveling yourself back to the 18th century and subjecting yourself to the same prejudices and limitations as the people who write these words.
“The constitution is a living document because the English language is a living language. And you need to have some readiness to understand that in order to serve on the court in a way that will actually make life better,” Buttigieg said.
“It was actually Thomas Jefferson himself who said that ‘We might as well ask a man to still wear the coat which fitted him when he was a boy as expect future generations to live under’ — what he called — ‘the regime of their barbarous ancestors,'” Buttigieg added.
“So even the founders that these kind of dead hand originalists claim fidelity to understood better than their ideological descendants — today’s judicial so-called conservatives — the importance of keeping with the times. And we deserve judges and justices who understand that.”
A California man has been convicted on murder and hate crime charges for the 2018 stabbing death of a gay, Jewish University of Pennsylvania student.
Samuel Woodward, 26, was found guilty of first-degree murder, plus a hate crime enhancement, for killing Blaze Bernstein, who had been visiting his family in southern California on winter break when he went missing around January 2, 2018.
After eight days, authorities searching for him found his body in a shallow grave at a nearby park.
Both Woodward and Bernstein had attended the same high school, Orange County School of the Arts, for a little over two years. According to testimony at trial, Woodward said he matched Bernstein on the dating app Tinder, in 2017.
The president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the development of the right-wing Project 2025 initiative, is being slammed for implying that this year's U.S. elections may devolve into violence.
Kevin Roberts made the comment last Tuesday on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast, which was hosted by former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.).
Roberts was commenting on the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that presidents enjoy presumptive immunity for any actions performed in their official capacity -- a decision handing former President Donald Trump a potential victory as he fights indictments over his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Following President Joseph R. Biden's announcement on Sunday that he would be dropping out of this year's presidential race, many of the groups that were most fervently in his camp, including LGBTQ organizations, voiced their support for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Biden abandoned his re-election bid after relentless pressure from party insiders and weeks of panicking from liberal activists following his disastrous performance against Donald Trump in a televised debate on June 27.
For weeks, pundits -- aided by the mainstream media -- called into question President Biden's age, physical fitness, and mental acuity, questioning whether the 81-year-old president could withstand the rigors of campaigning and whether he was the candidate best suited to articulate the Democratic Party's message and stances on various issues.
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