Barrett and Kavanaugh vote against religious liberty, for COVID tyranny

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh voted against religious liberty and for COVID tyranny when they joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the far-left wing of the Supreme Court to deny a preliminary injunction to a group of medical professionals seeking an exemption from Maine’s vaccine mandate.

The 6-3 ruling against religious liberty means that the group of Maine healthcare providers now face being mandatorily vaccinated for COVID against their religious beliefs or lose their jobs. “With Maine’s new rule coming into effect, one of the applicants has already lost her job for refusing to betray her faith; another risks the imminent loss of his medical practice,” Neil Gorsuch noted in his dissent.

Barrett and Kavanaugh provided the following explanation for voting the way they did (via Business Insider):

Barrett, joined by Kavanaugh in a concurring opinion, briefly remarked on their decision to block the request, citing the fact that the case was brought on the shadow docket, or as an emergency appeal. Shadow docket cases do not involve oral arguments or full rulings that are part of normal cases.

Barrett said the shadow docket should not be used for such a case, and that the court should not make this decision “on a short fuse without benefit of full briefing and oral argument,” implying she and Kavanaugh could vote differently if the case came before the court in a different way. (emphasis mine)

This vote by Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett against religious liberty and in support of COVID tyranny shouldn’t come as a surprise — their failure to protect and defend the Constitution is something I and my conservative brethren warned about when Trump and McConnell pushed their nominations through the system.

Before her appointment to the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett’s judicial track record revealed that she was a conservative fraud, not a strict constructionist of the Constitution. Instead, Barrett’s past showed that she was a big government, police state advocate who would continue the assault against our constitutionally protected liberties.

Constitutional attorney Robert Barnes reviewed over 40 cases involving Barrett and concluded that she would be a disaster as a Supreme Court justice when it comes to protecting liberty — particularly, religious liberty in the age of COVID tyranny:

“Coney Barrett has sid[ed] with the government on the lockdowns, on uncompensated takings, on excusing First Amendment infringements & Fourth Amendment violations… [and] exclaimed the benefits of Jacobson, the decision that green-lit forced vaccines & carved out an emergency exception to Constitutional protection in ‘public health’ or ’emergency’ cases used to justify forced sterilizations & detention camps.”

Barrett concurred with the majority in Illinois Republican Party et al. v. J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois to keep an illegal lockdown in place — effectively shredding the Constitution in the name of so-called safety — and she tried to hide her concurring vote behind the precedent established in 1905 in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in order to avoid taking responsibility for her decision.

The Jacobson decision gave the green light to forced vaccines, and it carved out the emergency exception to Constitutional protection in “public health” or “emergency” cases used to justify state-mandated vaccinations. It was also the legal basis used in Korematsu v United States where the court ruled in 1942 that the internment of Japanese Americans was acceptable.

Back in August, Barrett rejected a request to block Indiana University’s vaccine requirement for students without providing any reason for doing so. She made the decision without consulting other justices as she could have done and suggested that there was no legal justification for the request.

When Anthony Kennedy resigned, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell picked Brett Kavanaugh to replace him, and they promised that he was also a “strict constructionist.” But as we knew then and still know today, that was a lie.

Kavanaugh’s appointment to replace Kennedy was a bad deal for conservatives and the Constitution from the very beginning, and I opposed his confirmation for several reasons:

• His appointment was part of a secret deal between Trump and Kennedy
• His opinion that a sitting US President is above the law
• His track record of rulings against the Fourth Amendment
• His testimony before the Senate that Roe v. Wade is “settled law”

Ironically, Washington, D.C. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — a Clinton appointee, by the way — barred the Biden administration from firing unvaccinated federal employees last week, siding with plaintiffs who claimed that their employer’s refusal to allow a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate would result in irreparable harm.

With the recent FDA authorization of the COVID vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, and with the CDC likely to sign-off on distribution, vaccine mandates for children are pretty much a done deal. Based on what we’ve witnessed so far from Barrett and Kavanaugh, if a religious liberty challenge to such a mandate reaches the Supreme Court, it’s highly unlikely that children will be spared from COVID tyranny.

The judiciary was designed by the Founding Fathers to be the weakest branch of government; the real power is supposed to belong to “we the people” via the legislative branch and the individual states. In post-Constitutional America, unelected judges have taken that power from us.

Just like Trump’s other Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch — the justice who reinterpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to include the LGBT agenda — Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh are judicial tyrants working to destroy religious liberty, and COVID tyranny provides the perfect opportunity for them to continue doing so.

In a desperate attempt to save their jobs, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell claimed that the Republican Party had saved the courts and had put America back on the path to being the Constitutional Republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Not only was that a lie, their appointments to the Supreme Court have accomplished the exact opposite.

Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh voted against religious liberty and for COVID tyranny, and they’re likely to do so again in the future.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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