Well, they’re over. The Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett were subdued, non-confrontative and — amazingly — ended with a hug between Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the leading Democrat on the judiciary committee and Sen. Lindsay O. Graham, her Republication counterpart.
Can’t get much better than that. We will see if Democrats have another post-hearings ambush planned, as was the case with Brett Kavanaugh.
As for coverage of the nominee herself, it was somewhere between treating her as an exotic zoo creature and understanding her as the complex person that she is. Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece last week that expresses my thoughts about some of this news coverage.
This week, the New York Times published an article by three cultural anthropologists (identified as reporters) who were sent to the Midwest and South to discover the origins of Judge Barrett’s religious belief.
Days earlier, another excavation team from the Washington Post produced a similar piece, called “Amy Coney Barrett served as a ‘handmaid’ in Christian group People of Praise.” By the Post’s model of journalistic insinuation, People of Praise is about two removes from the Branch Davidian cult.
It’s an on-the-mark essay if you can get to it beyond the paywall. One more piece of it:
… the Times writers make clear, repeatedly, that Judge Barrett’s religiosity is . . . well, how can one put this? Let us just say that her religiosity is conveyed as not what one would expect to find in polite company today. At least not theirs.
But that same religiosity is found among millions of Americans, who don’t find Barrett’s decision to have a large family and practice a traditional form of faith to be strange at all.
One thing journalists did reflect accurately was how many Republicans kept going on and on and on about her being a married woman with seven kids. And how she played along with it, introducing her sizeable family whenever she could.
Of course the media noticed that. To quote the New York Times: