‘Dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face.” During Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, Democratic senator Cory Booker of New Jersey quoted a man who approached him at a town hall. “Dude, that’s a felony,” is how Senator Booker described his response. Good for him, fighting against our crazed political culture of anger, contempt, and even violence. I don’t agree with Cory Booker on a lot of things, but I agree, as he went on to say, that we need “a revival of civic grace.” He said: “Somewhere along the line, there’s going to be a moment. It’s coming. I think it’s long past that there has to be acts of heroism when it comes to extending grace.”
Now that was his pitch to Republicans to hold off on a vote on Amy Coney Barrett. Largely because I think Barrett may be the best thing that has happened to American politics in a long time, I disagree. Washington needs her. America needs her. She embodies grace in a lot of ways in her public witness. Listening to her in some of the exchanges was a civics lesson, when it wasn’t insane, to borrow the word of Peggy Noonan — Pulitzer Prize winner, speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan — about the state of the nation’s capital today. And we do mean insane. I’d walk away from the hearings, come back, and find a senator asking about whether Barrett had ever sexually harassed someone. What? Where did that come from? I had flashbacks to when Democrats threw the kitchen sink at Brett Kavanagh. One accusation was one thing, but then it seemed like they were ready to pull women off the street to make accusations against him.
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