On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights held a hearing entitled, "Supreme Court Fact-Finding and the Distortion of American Democracy." The two witnesses called by the Republican members of the Committee were Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher and the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro. As Shapiro pointed out during the hearing and in his prepared remarks, the title of the hearing itself is overblown:

I actually think that the hearing title is a bit loaded: first, because the Supreme Court doesn’t generally engage in fact-finding in the way trial courts do, but rather applies the law to novel facts, as any appellate court is supposed to; and second, because however much one thinks American democracy is “distorted,” the Supreme Court, a reactive institution, is hardly at fault. Indeed, the court is the most respected government institution other than police and the military, so hand-wringing over its role in governance—or broader questioning of its legitimacy—principally arises when the justices rule in ways that disagree with progressive orthodoxy or, more broadly, when progressives are frustrated that there’s a major institution they don’t control. The chairman himself filed a brief in last year’s Second Amendment case admonishing the Court to “heal itself before the public demands it be restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.”

Today, RNLA hosted a powerful webinar on Judge Amy Coney Barrett featuring the Network of enlightened Women's Karin Lips and The Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro. The event came as Democrats are even using the President’s COVID-19 diagnosis as a reason to delay hearings on Judge Barrett’s confirmation. The reality is that the Democrats and their liberal allies will go to extreme lengths of any means to defeat or delay Judge Barrett’s nomination. 

One of the worst tactics utilized by liberals is attacking Judge Barrett based on her gender. As Karin Lips explains: "Popular feminists today are quick to mock, delegitimize, and pressure conservative women into silence. To many, we are 'gender traitors' once we speak out or support conservatives in public life."

RNLA Co-Chair Harmeet Dhillon wrote today in The Daily Caller about how the response to the coronavirus, especially in states like California in full lockdown, threatens civil liberties:

Democrats often seem to cite certain events as the world is going to end if, or when, they happen -- whether it was Al Gore’s climate disaster by 2016 or the end of the internet when FEC Chair Ajit Pai ended net neutrality.  This week another anniversary of one of those doomsday events occurred, the tenth anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC which was decided on January 21, 2010.  As Cato scholar Ilya Shapiro wrote on the fifth anniversary:

President Obama’s famous statement during his 2010 State of the Union Address: “The Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates of special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”

In that one sentence, the former law professor made four errors that are all too common.