Media Runs With Alumni Letter Bashing Amy Coney Barrett, Just Like They Did With Brett Kavanaugh

A nakedly partisan letter written by alumni at Rhodes College, where Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett attended, is gaining media headlines.

“More than 1K alumni from Amy Coney Barrett’s undergrad college sign letter of concern,” read the headline at The Hill. “More than 1,500 alums of Rhodes College sounded off against Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination in a letter,” wrote Business Insider. The list goes on.

The reality is that those who wrote and signed the letter didn’t know Barrett personally and simply disagree with her on legal matters such as Roe v. Wade and Obamacare — because the signers are mostly, if not all, liberal.

People who knew Barrett, such as her former law professor John Garvey (now the president of Catholic University of America), called her the “best student I ever had.”

“I was teaching a First Amendment class at Notre Dame Law School. She was a student, just a face in the crowd. On the final exam, someone — the bluebooks were anonymous — had written an answer so impressive that I rushed to share it with one of my colleagues. This student, I said, gave a response to my own question much better than the one I had come up with myself. That student was Amy Coney,” Garvey wrote at The Washington Post.

Another law professor, Carter Snead, who is also the director of the Center of Ethics and Cutler at Notre Dame, where Barrett attended law school, said “you will never find someone who is more fair-minded, more honest, more disciplined, more just than Amy Barrett.”

Meanwhile, the alumni from Rhodes College show their hand not just by the topics on which they attack Barrett but condemn Rhodes College president Marjorie Hass for even acknowledging Barrett graduated from the college.

“We are likewise firmly and passionately opposed to Rhodes administrators’ attempts to embrace Amy Coney Barrett as an alumna of our beloved alma mater,” the alumni wrote. “We oppose this embrace because we believe both her record and the process that has produced her nomination are diametrically opposed to the values of truth, loyalty, and service that we learned at Rhodes.”

Hass had released a statement on September 22 praising Barrett for her “professional distinction and achievement.”

This is the same tactic partisans took — and the media ran with — during President Donald Trump’s last Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. At that time, media outlets including The Hill rushed to promote a letter from more than 400 former Yale Law School students who, again, didn’t actually know Kavanaugh but who disagreed with him for the policies he might have supported once confirmed. These alumni, claiming to be morally better than Kavanaugh, said “people will die” if he were confirmed.

“Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country,” the allegedly fair-minded and rational alumni wrote.

That letter against Kavanaugh received more headlines and supportive articles than a letter from numerous women who had worked for him defending him from dubious allegations that he had sexually assaulted a woman when he was in high school.