Justice Barrett,
You should be ashamed to bear a title so at odds with the manner in which it was acquired. Your appointment to the Supreme Court was an injustice, and not merely an ethical one or by some matter of opinion, but by the plain and public facts of its circumstances.
Reprehensible as the act of confirming you was, the United States Senate’s inaction on the single issue of urgency before them was an omission vile in its intention and murderous in its effect. In lieu of any semblance of attention to securing aid for the millions of your fellow citizens threatened one way or another by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Senate majority leadership, in a naked last grab for power and dominion over our country, used your nomination and confirmation to fill the void then call it quits. Americans will suffer for that choice. For lack of deserved assistance, they will lose jobs, they will lose homes, they will loved ones and they will lose their lives. Americans will die.
Americans will die, and you had the power to stop it. I will not assume your motivations, but neither can you protest your innocence. You knew. You knew you could stop it. You knew and you did nothing. For that, by today’s laws you get to assume the title of “Justice” for your lifetime appointment to parody that word. Your cowardice is painful to every principled, compassionate alumnus of our university, the sort who takes pride in history’s accounts of our stands, sometimes at personal peril, against injustice to our fellow Americans and fellow human beings. Offered your opportunity to save others, you chose the vanity of hollow ambition and the conceit of dubious distinction, accepting their cost in human misery and human lives.
Resign.
Chris Hoffman
Class of 2003
Oct. 26
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
