Fact Check: Biden Caught Red-Handed Lying to Americans About Amy Coney Barrett
Day 1 of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination hearings hadn’t gotten off the ground before Joe Biden was lying about her in front of a camera.
And as usual with Biden, it didn’t take long for the truth to come out.
The former vice president and current Democratic nominee for president was on his way to a plane to Ohio on Monday morning, according to the Washington Examiner, when he paused to answer a question about President Donald Trump’s third nominee to the high court.
Biden could have contented himself with again spinning a yarn about how the Barrett nomination is “unconstitutional” (it’s not). He could have complained that Republicans were violating their own precedent from the 2016 fight over Obama nominee Merrick Garland (they’re not).
Instead, being Biden, he went straight to a flat-out lie about the nominee’s record – particularly as it relates to the monstrosity known as Obamacare.
“This nominee said she wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act — this president wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said. “Let’s keep our eye on the ball. This is about less than one month, Americans are going to lose their health insurance.”
Check out the video below. The crucial part starts about 20 seconds in, but viewers who watch from the beginning will get to watch as Biden pretty clearly could not remember the name of Mitt Romney — a fairly familiar name in political circles, being the current senator and former Massachusetts governor who challenged Biden and then-President Barack Obama in the 2012 election. (Yet more evidence that Biden is not entirely with it upstairs.)
Joe Biden tells reporters that Barrett’s faith should not be considered during her confirmation process. “Let’s keep our eye on the ball,” he said. “This is about whether or not in one month Americans are going to lose their health insurance.” https://t.co/cn0lFQdYdM pic.twitter.com/1NcOf972ki
— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 12, 2020
What Biden said was simply not true, though as usual with Biden’s fabrications, there was a fact buried in there that served as his stepping stone to fantasy.
As Fox News reported, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare on Nov. 10.
If the Senate confirms Barrett, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has all but vowed, she will be on the high court in time for those arguments.
The problem is that Biden grossly overstated Barrett’s writings on Obamacare to the point of malicious fiction.
As the Washington Examiner reported, in a 2017 piece for the law review of Notre Dame Law School, Barrett took on the 2012 landmark opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts that contorted logical and legal thought to find a way to uphold the constitutionality of the law.
“Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” Barrett wrote. “He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power; had he treated the payment as the statute did — as a penalty — he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress’s commerce power.”
Countless opinions have been written about Roberts’ ruling in that case, and American conservatives know well that they’ve never fully trusted the chief justice since (with very good reason). But the point here is not Roberts’ mangling of the law to get his desired result — or even the likely result of the new Obamacare case.
It’s Biden’s willful misrepresentation of what Barrett wrote about Obamacare that matters.
.@JoeBiden falsely claimed that Judge Amy Coney Barrett wants to eliminate the Affordable Care Act.https://t.co/NQYhcrz2pG
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 12, 2020
She did not write that she wanted to get rid of Obamacare. She wrote that the ruling that upheld it was a willful construction by Roberts that pushed the words of the law beyond their “plausible meaning.”
In other words, if there is an argument that Obamacare and its infringements on American liberty are constitutional, Roberts’ ruling didn’t make it.
“A faithful judge resists the temptation to conflate the meaning of the Constitution with the judge’s own political preference,” Barrett wrote later in the review piece.
Those are words every conservative can get behind – they’re words every American should get behind.
But they’re deadly to Democrats, who’ve spent decades winning victories in court they could never win in a free and fair election.
Democrats know that, which is why they’ve turned Supreme Court confirmations – a hitherto routine part of constitutional government – into one more front in their endless attacks on the constitutional government established by the Founders.
Many Americans have probably forgotten how big of a role Biden played in that development.
He was the Senate Judiciary chairman, after all, when Judge Robert Bork’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was destroyed in 1987.
He was also chairman of the Judiciary Committee in 1991, when the nomination of now-Justice Clarence Thomas was very nearly destroyed by 11th-hour attacks and accusations of sexual harassment.
Thanks in large part to Biden’s own career, Democrats have made it clear they’re capable of going to disgraceful lengths to stop a conservative justice from being seated on the court.
No American who witnessed the 2018 battle over Brett Kavanaugh can ever forget that.
And now comes Joe Biden again, about to get on a campaign plane in his third run for the presidency, launching a lie at an honorable nominee like Amy Coney Barrett before her hearings even got off the ground.
Unfortunately for Democrats, the day wasn’t even over before the truth came out.
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