Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) used her time Wednesday with Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett to point out the obvious: women are only celebrated by those on the left if they adhere to progressive ideals.
“What I have watched [the Democrats] do through this entire process … is they have chosen intellectual isolation as opposed to having diversity bring a different perspective,” said Blackburn. “And to me, that really is very sad.”
The senator from Tennessee went on to tell her colleagues on the left that the American people “don’t fear” the words and beliefs of conservative Catholic women any more than they do the words and beliefs of leftist female protesters standing outside the Senate chamber opposing Barrett’s nomination to the high court.
“Some of my colleagues on the other side of the dais have seemed to be quite amazed that you could balance career and family,” Blackburn said. “And I would think that they would choose to praise you for finding a way to do the work that you feel called to do and balancing it all. Maybe they should be curious about how you meet the demands of family and work and friends and church.”
She decried the Democrats “tone of condescension” toward the existence of a woman “from the political right who would try to have it all.”
Blackburn, who lives in Nashville, invoked the words of a country song made famous by the late entertainer Eddy Arnold, “You Don’t Know Me.”
“The story behind the song — what [Arnold] had shared with the songwriter who wrote it — was that many times we miss the richness of a relationship because we don’t stop and take the time to get to know someone,” she explained. “And that, I think, is what my colleagues did to you. They made this all about the Affordable Care Act, they made it all about issues that they wanted to talk about because we are 20 days away from an election.”
The Republican lawmaker went on to call out Democrats for having “projected stereotypes onto” Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Those stereotypes are what they think about us as women on the political right, and they enjoy being able to mock and to ridicule and to diminish and to demean,” Blackburn said. “To them, it is political sport. It is the politics of personal destruction, and it is wrong.”
Blackburn then got to the crux of the Democrats’ disdain for women like Barrett who “don’t fit into their elitist format.”
“You’re a girl from the South, from New Orleans,” she said. “You went to school at Rhodes [College] in Memphis. I don’t know if my colleagues have ever been to Memphis or been to Rhodes, which is a wonderful school, but you don’t fit into their Harvard, Ivy League type group — you’re not a part of the clique or the club.”
In the eyes of those on the left, the senator explained, Barrett “messed up” because, after clerking for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, she chose to leave Washington, D.C., to return to Notre Dame — her alma mater — to become a professor and pursue a family, which now boasts seven children, “right there, in the middle of the heartland.”
“Now they don’t want to admit you got where you got, you earned it,” concluded Blackburn, clearly emotional. “Nobody gave you a shortcut. You earned it. And that is why we are so honored to support you. Thank you.”