I begin with a confession. When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court I thought of her as Church Lady from Saturday Night Live, expecting to find in her writings a strident ideologue completely unsuited to assume Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. Instead, I found a person of intelligence and wit, willing to reconsider the validity of the textualist creed that brought her to eminence in such circles as the Federalist Society. Better yet, she could write! Antonin Scalia, another master of English prose with whom I profoundly disagree,
was clearly onto something when he chose her as a clerk and acolyte. And, as a Recovering Catholic myself, notwithstanding that she is a practicing one, I couldn’t help but sense a kinship with her theological worldview and its dedication to first principles, tempered by a Jesuitical facility in amending first principles when they collide with reality.