There’s little that President Trump loves more than cementing his supporters’ adoration of him while making his foes squirm. Nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court would do both. She’s not just a staunch conservative over whom Republicans and Democrats would wage a familiar fight. She’s the prompt for an all-out culture war.
I can almost see the president licking his chops.
Since the announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement last week, Barrett, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has emerged as a front-runner for his seat. She was one of four finalists interviewed by Trump on Monday, when CBS News, without specifying its source or sources, identified her as one of two leading contenders. The other was Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Many conservatives are lobbying ardently on her behalf. Ramesh Ponnuru made a point-by-point case for her in a column for Bloomberg. Matthew Walther did the same in The Week. There’s plenty more elsewhere, and to wade through it is to realize, quickly, that the push for Barrett isn’t based solely on her credentials. It’s also based on the kind of debate about her that conservatives prophesy.
Barrett, you see, talks readily and proudly about her Catholicism, making no bones about its presence at the center of her life. She and her husband have seven children, two of whom are adopted. She belongs to a mostly Catholic group, People of Praise, whose members make an especially intense commitment to their faith.
And Republicans expect — and want — liberals to be so freaked out by this that they oppose her in a manner that can be branded anti-religious. They’re setting her up to be a Christian martyr, minus the grisly end, and daring Democrats to take the bait.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake sagely sized up the appeal of this dynamic to Trump, writing that it’s “exactly the kind of battle he generally relishes: One that invites his opponents to overreach.” My Times colleague Ross Douthat tweeted that if Trump wants to “trigger the libs,” he’ll nominate Barrett. Douthat further predicted that her nomination “might bring on the culture-war apocalypse.”
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