Your support helps National Review stay in the fight. And that fight will go on.
It’s easy to have opinions. It’s harder work to back them up. The Supreme Court nomination fight over Amy Coney Barrett, coming right in the heat of the presidential race, calls for more than just opinions: It calls for knowing the history and the law, and marshaling the evidence. That takes preparation. And your support helps make that happen, which is why we are asking again for donations.
In March, I made the leap from practicing law and writing on the side to writing full-time. There is no better place to do that than at National Review. NR has long been a forum to argue any number of different viewpoints within conservatism and to take seriously the defense of conservative ideas and values. And in doing so, we don’t just toss out clickbait for today’s controversy and move on. We have to take seriously the idea of enduring principles, of things that are not only true for a news cycle.
For my role here, I cover the law and the courts a good deal. Coming from a global law firm with clients with a stake in all sorts of controversies, I wasn’t at liberty to write about an increasing number of things — including, after the Kavanaugh hearings, Supreme Court fights. But as a full-time writer at National Review, I’m free to bring my decades of legal experience to bear to cover anything, and I have the time to go in depth. In the Barrett fight, that has paid dividends. In August, seeing the possibility that there might be a Supreme Court vacancy before the end of Donald Trump’s term, I dug into the history and laid out the case for why precedent supported filling the vacancy. Being ready to go with that research made a difference: As Rich Lowry noted on Monday and as Politico has reported, my essay and the statistics I developed have been cited by the White House and multiple senators in this controversy, including during these hearings. And knowing the history meant that I could put up a quick Corner post during the vice-presidential debate rebutting Kamala Harris’s fabricated history of Abraham Lincoln’s nomination of a new chief justice in 1864 — a post that was one of the most widely shared things on the site all year.
I say this not to brag — well, maybe just a little — but to underline what a difference we can make together. I was able to come aboard at NR and write these things because of NR’s readers, subscribers, and donors. We’re not just casting words into a void, and we can’t do it without you as part of our team. Your support helps National Review stay in the fight. And that fight will go on.
