October, 26 2020, 12:00am EDT
Senate Votes Today on Trump's Anti-Worker, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Consumer Nominee
Amy Coney Barrett has tried to hide her record. what little we know paints a deeply distressing picture.
WASHINGTON
Today, a mere 30 days after President Trump formally announced her nomination and eight days before Election Day, senators will cast their votes on Amy Coney Barrett for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. In just half the length of an average modern Supreme Court nomination process, Trump and his Senate allies have pushed their extremist choice for the high court through to the finish line -- despite gaping holes in publicly available information about her judicial record and a deeply troubling series of decisions in her history slowly coming to light from independent sources.
An in-depth analysis of Barrett's decisions from her brief time on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals by government watchdog Accountable.US revealed several troubling patterns in Barrett's judicial history: time and again, she has overwhelmingly ruled in favor of corporations over workers and consumers. She has inordinately voted against immigrants. And she has repeatedly protected law enforcement entities over those alleging harm.
"Today's Senate vote will determine whether generations of Americans' lives are placed in the hands of an extremist whose record remains hidden from the public in one of the least transparent and most rushed nomination processes in recent memory," said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. "The willingness of the president and his allies in the Senate to shirk their responsibility to help keep families and small businesses afloat through the pandemic in favor of rushing through a nominee who has shrouded her record from the public at every possible turn is a complete affront to the American people. Senate Republicans' warped priorities have never been more disturbingly clear."
Amid a burgeoning third surge of COVID-19 cases across the U.S., a coming wave of evictions and second wave of mass job losses, bleak prospects ahead for small businesses that have managed to survive the Trump recession thus far, and widespread food insecurity, Trump and his Senate allies have actively pushed aside efforts to address Americans' suffering in order to hijack democratic norms and processes in service of their radical judicial agenda.
And Barrett's evasive answers in her nomination hearings -- paired with her subsequent non-answers to senators' follow-up questions for the record -- reveal an acute hostility to everything from the Affordable Care Act to abortion rights to environmental protections.
Learn more about the stakes of Barrett's rushed nomination here.
Accountable.US is a nonpartisan watchdog that exposes corruption in public life and holds government officials and corporate special interests accountable by bringing their influence and misconduct to light. In doing so, we make way for policies that advance the interests of all Americans, not just the rich and powerful.
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For perspective, the Times noted that these deductibles would be "eight times the average for someone with job-based insurance."
Health experts who spoke with the Times were blunt about these plans' prospects for success.
"Nobody wants that product," Harvard health economist Amitabh Chandra said. "It’s going to be a really cheap product that nobody wants."
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The EU's priority now is "about bringing illegal arrivals to a minimum and keeping those numbers there," Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner said when presenting the bloc's migration strategy in January.
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