We know what she will do on the court

Letter to the editor in today's NY Times:

Amy Coney Barrett on the Court: What’s at Stake

To the editor:

Trustworthy people tell us that Amy Coney Barrett is smart and nice, as if that decides the question whether she should be made a Supreme Court justice. 

But the court has had plenty of smart, nice members who were terrible justices, just as there have been great justices who were neither. What the Supreme Court requires is good judgment and a sense of justice, neither of which is particularly correlated to being loved by friends or to loving one’s family.

We don’t know much about Judge Barrett’s judgment or sense of justice, and she did her best at her confirmation hearings to keep it that way. 

What we do know is that she has been aggressively promoted by radical movement conservatives and that she was chosen by a president who has dedicated himself to putting such conservatives on the court.

To think she is anything other than a radical movement conservative assumes that the people who have promoted her are incompetent in advancing their agenda. And whatever one may think of them or their agenda, they have been anything but incompetent in advancing it.

Can we at least stop pretending that there’s any question about what she’ll do on the court?

Larry Kramer

San Francisco

The writer is president of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation 

and former dean of Stanford Law School.