1. Short thread. I wrote a piece about the Scotus hearing and ACB's misleading effort to portray herself a neutral baseball umpire who just calls balls and strikes, going by the law.

2. The interchange was with Senator Durbin about her 2019 dissent in Kanter v Barr, a case about whether states can ban convicted felons from buying guns. The other members of the panel, citing the landmark Heller case in the Scotus, said they could.

3. Scalia, ACB's mentor, wrote the Heller opinion. But instead of going by it, she invented a new exclusion for non-violent felons, saying states needed to prove they had a proclivity for violence before preventing them from buying guns.

4. That wasn't textualism or originalism. It was conservative judicial activism, and in bringing it up Durbin effectively undermined Judge Barrett's "Aw shucks, I just go by the books" shtick. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-hearings-are-an-enlightening-sham