Comedian Bill Maher tore into Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Friday, describing her as “nuts” and whose Catholic faith should have been used against her by Senate Democrats.
“New rule: Democrats have to stop talking about packing the Supreme Court, because it’s already packed — with Catholics,” Maher said. He went on to criticize the fact that Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, and Neil Gorsuch all have Catholic backgrounds, though he noted Gorsuch later became an Episcopalian, which Maher described as “just a Catholic who flunked Latin.”
Maher lamented that if Barrett is confirmed, seven of the nine justices will be Roman Catholics, which he said he has “nothing against … except my entire upbringing.”
“If seven out of nine justices were Jews or Muslims or Buddhists, would that be okay?” Maher asked. “And if faith is this super-important element of life, as Barrett and her Republican supporters say it is, shouldn’t we have a healthier balance on our highest court?”
Maher pointed out that the religiously unaffiliated are the nation’s fastest-growing demographic and questioned why, given that statistic, there are not more atheists and agnostics on the Supreme Court.
“Atheists actually make better judges because we don’t have to work to separate church and state,” Maher argued. Referencing the Bible, he added, “We’re not torn between rational decision-making and what it says in the old book of Jewish fairy tales.”
Maher went on to mock Barrett for having told graduate students that their legal careers should be seen as a means of “building the Kingdom of God,” and also slammed her for being an alleged conduit for those who want to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“She’s been groomed since birth to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Maher said. “She’s like the Terminator: a robot programmed to fulfill one task. Except she wasn’t sent from the future, she was sent from the past.”
After attacking conservative Catholics, Attorney General Bill Barr, The Federalist Society, Mel Gibson, and Pope Benedict XVI, Maher went after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for not attacking Barrett’s faith more forcefully.
“Chuck Schumer said Democrats won’t make Barrett’s religion an issue, but they should because being nuts is relevant,” Maher asserted.
WATCH:
Maher also attacked Barrett last month, calling the devout Catholic mother of seven “a f***ing nut.”
As The Daily Wire reported:
Leftist Bill Maher launched an attack against President Donald Trump’s reported Supreme Court nominee on Saturday, calling the mother of seven and devout Catholic a “f***ing nut.”
“But apparently the pick is going to be this omy…a-omy…Amy Comey [sic],” Maher said as he started to laugh, “well, we’ll be saying this name a lot I’m sure because she’s a f***ing nut.”
“Religion, I was right about that one, too,” Maher said. “Amy, I’m sorry but, Amy Comey [sic] Barrett — Catholic, really Catholic, I mean really, really Catholic, like speaking in tongues. Like she doesn’t believe in condoms, which [is] what she has in common with Trump because he doesn’t either — I remember that from Stormy Daniels.”
Let the hate begin. @BillMaher on Amy Coney Barrett: “A fucking nut.” #RealTime #AmyConeyBarrett pic.twitter.com/Qm7BPAtkt9
— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) September 26, 2020
In his dissent against the landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, the late Justice Antonin Scalia also criticized the high court’s demographics, especially given the fact that so much power has been vested in the opinions of just nine people.
Scalia warned of the danger posed by the increasingly powerful role of the judicial branch of the federal government, writing in part:
This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School.
Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single South-westerner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.
The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not.
And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
[…]
Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall. The Judiciary is the “least dangerous” of the federal branches because it has “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm” and the States, “even for the efficacy of its judgments.” With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the “reasoned judgment” of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.
Related: Bill Maher Attacks Trump’s Reported SCOTUS Pick, A Christian Mother Of 7: ‘A F***ing Nut’