The Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Neomi Rao on Tuesday showed yet again that though Democrats claim to be the party that champions women and minorities, they really only care about championing those who agree with their increasingly radical policy views. Instead of celebrating the impressive career and achievements of a minority woman, the daughter of immigrants, the Senate Judiciary Democrats attacked her and tried to mischaracterize her views. As Ashley Baker explained in Fox News today, Rao is a threat to the Democrats precisely because she is a minority woman who does not have progressive views:
The problem for Democrats is that the D.C. Circuit, often called “the second highest court in the land”, is a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Of the nine justices currently on the Supreme Court, four have come from the D.C. Circuit. Democrats see Rao, a minority woman, as a contender for the next Supreme Court vacancy and are determined to wound her in advance.
This is nothing new. An irony of Democrats' judicial confirmation politics is that their efforts to thwart nominations deliberately and disproportionately impact stellar minority and female nominees. Just ask Miguel Estrada or Janice Rogers Brown.
Ms. Baker described how the women Democrats were the worst offenders on Tuesday and thereby hurt the women's movement they claim to support:
The feminist left hates the fact that conservative women think for themselves. Feminists would prefer to do the thinking for them. It’s a sentiment that is anti-progressive in every possible way. . . .
The female senators attacking Rao proudly display their feminist label and are surely aware that the early suffrage movement was held back by divisions among women. That makes it all the more unconscionable that, through their political posturing, Rao's opponents are adding to the growing divide among women that endangers the basic mission of the women's movement.
One of the ways the Democrats attempted to attack Neomi Rao on Tuesday was through intrusive questions into her personal religious beliefs, not in the context of whether or how she would apply those beliefs to a particular case before her but simply in the abstract. Yesterday, Senator Mike Lee called out his Democratic colleagues for these questions and astoundingly, Senator Mazie Hirono defended them:
Sen. Lee: The problem with asking a nominee about the particulars of his or her religious beliefs is that those questions inevitably expose those beliefs as somehow a qualifier or disqualifier for public office. That is flatly inconsistent with the letter, at least the spirit if not also the letter, of at least two provisions of the Constitution. I cannot fathom why this would ever make sense to do. There was a time in this country when people might have been asked in a job interview context or in the context of a hearing like those we hold here, whether someone believed in God. Whether they were Christian. When they might have been asked those, it was never for a good reason, because there is never a good reason in a public setting to ask that question, save perhaps if you just want to make sure that that person's religious beliefs do not require that person to betray the judicial oath. Beyond that, I can't fathom a circumstance in which that would be appropriate. So I would ask Senator Hirono, in what circumstance, in what way, shape, or form is asking Neomi Rao whether she believes particular conduct to be sinful, an appropriate question to be asked in this committee, ever?
Sen. Hirono: These probing questions, if you were to list all the questions that we ask, they have to do with whether or not these nominees' very strongly held religious views, as well as any other views, may not enable them to be objective as judges in lifetime positions. I think that's a legitimate area of inquiry. . . .
Senate Democrats' opposition and outright hostility to the talented women that President Trump has nominated to the bench, from Amy Coney Barrett to Britt Grant to Neomi Rao, reveals their true agenda: promoting and protecting progressive policies at any cost, even if it means trampling the empowered, successful women they claim to champion.