WASHINGTON, DC – During testimony at her Senate confirmation hearing, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and Handmaid Amy Coney Barrett expressed her enthusiastic desire to legally deny her four daughters basic rights and freedoms available to most women since the 1970s.
“People think that I’m only interested in using my children as a political prop to bolster my confirmation chances and that’s just not true,” said Barrett. “I am also absolutely interested in ensuring that my daughters have fewer rights and protections as they grow up than I had during my childhood. That’s what I call progress.”
When challenged as to whether her selectively originalist approach to the law would someday exclude girls like her daughters from the same professional success that she’s achieved, Barrett was unconcerned. “Why would I worry about that? I stood on the shoulders of generations of feminist giants and used their successes—the rights to educational opportunities, to workplace equality, to plan whether and when to have children—to exceed even my wildest dreams for myself. But now that I got mine, who really cares about anyone else?”
Barrett referred reporters to earlier legal writings in which she makes clear the many advantages afforded to women by their lack of full legal and political rights. “The pay gap really works for women,” she wrote in a 2006 academic paper for the University of Notre Dame. “Earning only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes encourages women to realize that there’s a lot more to life than just having a successful career and independence. Plus, math is hard.”
Republican senators who have spent the last week in worshipful praise of Barrett for the apparently novel achievement of having multiple children were gleeful about their opportunity to ensure other women have no chance to achieve similar success in the future.
“Barrett’s hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug,” said Senator Ted Cruz. “Because the only thing better than imposing restrictive gender roles on an unwilling populace is ensuring that it’s a woman who does the imposing. That’s my feminism, baby.”
Democrats, however, did all they could to stop the “Odious ACB.” Senator Diane Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, drew a hard line against Barrett’s nomination and the process Republicans have used to advance it. At the conclusion of the hearings, she tore into committee chairman Lindsay Graham with an intense bear hug and a sharply worded “thank you” before gifting him with a plate of chocolate chip cookies. “I didn’t give him a glass of milk to go with those cookies,” said Feinstein, “so I think my point has been effectively made.”
