By Chris Powell
Because she once said something nice about a judge long before that judge made it to the U.S. Supreme Court and ruled that there is no federal constitutional right to abortion, Sandra Slack Glover is not going to be appointed to Connecticut’s Supreme Court. Indeed, as long as Democratic abortion fanatics control the General Assembly, Glover may be lucky if she is allowed to continue to live in Connecticut.
What happened to Glover may constitute the dumbest case of guilt by association since the Red Scare of the 1950s.
Democratic legislators defeated Glover’s nomination by Governor Lamont not because she is opposed to abortion — to the contrary, as she made clear at her confirmation hearing, she is as enthusiastic about abortion as any of the legislators who opposed her. They defeated her because, along with many other former law clerks for the U.S. Supreme Court, she had attested to the legal intellect and good character of her former colleague in clerkship, Amy Coney Barrett, when Barrett was nominated to a federal appellate court.
Of course upon being promoted to the Supreme Court years later, Barrett joined the majority that overturned the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which had proclaimed a constitutional right to abortion.
Had Glover and the other clerks lied about their colleague’s legal intellect and good character?
Is it impossible for anyone with legal intellect and good character to conclude that the Constitution leaves abortion policy to the states?
By attesting to Barrett’s intellect and character, years before Barrett reached the Supreme Court, had Glover become especially responsible for Barrett’s appointment and the reversal of Roe?
Should Glover have known, five years earlier, how Barrett would vote in the case in which Roe was reversed?
Or were the Democratic legislators who opposed Glover just taking out on her, as their nearest available target, the rage they feel about the reversal of Roe, though there is no threat to abortion rights in Connecticut?
Only those possibilities can explain the opposition to Glover.
But Glover only hurt herself when confronted about her character reference for Barrett. She said that in hindsight it was wrong and apologized for it.
She didn’t say exactly why was it wrong but implied that, upon her nomination to the state Supreme Court, it turned out to be wrong politically for her. This was cowardice.
Glover could have noted the obvious — that the endorsement letter from her fellow clerks did not predict how Barrett would rule as a judge, that many legal scholars of good character disagreed with the Roe decision, and that people may disagree about constitutional law while respecting each other and being cordial, even friends.
After all, the late Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero of the political left, and Antonin Scalia, a hero of the political right, were far apart on constitutional law but nevertheless close friends who often socialized with their spouses. Somehow Ginsberg remains a hero of the left despite not just her friendship with Scalia but also her assertion that the Roe decision was poorly reasoned.
But as is suggested by the transfer to Glover of the rage against Barrett, today’s angry political environment is quick to demonize disagreement.
At her hearing Glover could have challenged her questioners.
Did they think she and all the other clerks who affirmed Barrett’s legal intellect and good character had been lying?
Did they think that Barrett’s disagreement with Roe’s reasoning — reasoning also faulted by liberal hero Ginsberg — made Barrett a bad person?
Did they think that anyone who is unenthusiastic about abortion is a bad person?
Instead Glover whined that she had thought that, even with Barrett as a member, the Supreme Court would have upheld Roe, as if precedent is sacred and as if the court has not often, and fortunately so, reversed major precedents, and to the left’s delight — precedents like Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Lochner v. New York.
But rather than talk back to the fanatics, Glover groveled. Thus in the end she may have disqualified herself.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 