Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that Republicans would “regret” confirming Amy Coney Barrett as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Co-host Sunny Hostin said, “Rahm, Amy Coney Barrett is now Justice Barrett having been officially sworn in as the newest Supreme Court justice after what many Democrats are calling an illegitimate process. Minority Leader Schumer is saying Republicans will regret her confirmation. Do you think they will?”
Emanuel said, “Yes. Well, let me say I do think the Republicans will regret this. Not only what they did here, but what they did to Merrick Garland at the end of 2016. They’ve twice now bent the rules and cracked them and broken them to basically seize power of the Supreme Court and politicized the Supreme Court. I think it’s going to lead, in my own view, assuming the election turns out how I think where Joe Biden will get elected, and the Democrats most likely take the Senate, it will bring a change to the filibuster rule. I think it will help the Senate because it will make it a legislative body again rather than a body of obstruction.”
He continued, “Second, I think it will also lead to expansion of the appellate court orders which they should have been doing anyway, and Democrats will move in filling up the caseload. I do think the Republicans made a mistake. I also think Amy Coney Barrett made a mistake. She should not have gone to the White House given we have a potential contested election. I think it actually damaged her independence and her sense of being above politics like the court. I think it was a bad thing, and you notice the contrast only Thomas went, and none of the other justices went. I think that actually showed a lack of self-awareness of what’s going on by her early on.”
He added, “The vice president has already said he’s going to have a commission to study it. I think we should step back and not only say the Supreme Court but the entire legal system, how to depoliticize what’s happening. The Republicans and McConnell’s been upfront about this, have went to take a third institution, a third leg of checks and balances, and politicize the entire process. I think we should step back, try to figure out a way of how to scrub it from that. I think we also think part of that process will be a series of things that the bipartisan commission recommended are the right things to do.”
He concluded, “What I do think we should do is get back to legislating, and I’ll give you an example of this. We talk about defending Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court appropriately, but well over 80% of the counties in the United States, you cannot get an abortion because of what’s happening at the state legislature and state government. Now to me, what we should be talking about is winning elections and implementing our policies across the country, whether that’s making sure that women are not allies, gays are not back in the closet, immigrants are not put back on boats, immigrants are not working sweatshops. We don’t want to go back to 1965, which is where Mitch McConnell and the Supreme Court is trying to take us. America doesn’t want to go back to 1955.”
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