Republicans are Desperately Trying to Change the Subject

by Neil J. Young

Neil J. Young is a historian and the author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. He writes frequently on American politics, culture, and religion for publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, Vox, and Politico. He co-hosts the history podcast Past Present.

Amy Coney Barrett may or may not be President Trump's nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, but that hasn't stopped Republicans and conservative media outlets from cooking up a fake controversy about her potential nomination in the meantime.

Barrett, a circuit judge on the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, is a devout Catholic and active in the Christian group People of Praise, a prayer organization that grew out of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement and which some have questioned due to its opacity and possible influence over its members. Although she has never ruled on a case directly concerning abortion rights, religious conservatives believe that Barrett would be a reliable vote to overturn Roe v. Wade when an abortion case comes before the high court.

Given that, conservative media and Republican politicians have spent the last week stirring up the false story that "the left" is waging an all-out anti-Catholic attack on Barrett, a deliberate move to distract from the real story — that Republicans outrageously plan to ramrod a Supreme Court nominee through the Senate just weeks before the election.

That story should be front page news everywhere. Not only is it a hypocritical about-face on the Republicans' so-called "McConnell rule" of 2016, it is the plainest example of the GOP's absolute corruption of our democratic processes and the norms that safeguard them. Instead, Fox News has, not surprisingly, put the Barrett story into overdrive, with regular segments on Democrats' supposed anti-Catholic assaults on the judge.

But even normally cooler conservative heads, like S.E. Cupp, have helped hype the hysteria. In her column for the New York Daily News, Cupp called the "anti-Catholic attacks" on Barrett "gross" and "shameful." Her evidence? One tweet from Reuters and three from individuals who hold no political office and whom most Americans have never heard of. In her piece, Cupp linked to an article from the Christian Broadcasting Network that brashly claimed the "anti-Catholic attacks" against Barrett "are already flowing." But the CBN article couldn't provide one example of that actually happening this past week. No one has shown any substantive proof that a coordinated and sustained campaign of religious bigotry against Barrett is underway. Conservatives' concocted crisis is mostly smoke and little fire.

That doesn't matter to the target audience, of course, who thrive on outrage rather than evidence. And the manufactured Barrett brouhaha isn't really even about the Supreme Court itself, since whoever Trump nominates will have enough Republican votes to confirm them. Instead, it's about the symbolic meaning of the Supreme Court to Trump's base of religious conservatives and how stoking cultural resentments has become the go-to electoral strategy of the right.

Read entire article at The Week