Thanks to the horrific associations they conjure, any floodlit, outdoor, nighttime political rally can bring on a reflexive chill. To frighten? And by frightening, impress? Was that the message behind Amy Coney Barrett’s nighttime gathering of Republican conspirators in a strange, after hours Supreme Court swearing in ceremony? Why the inverse mimicry of an earlier, afternoon super spreader event?
In the coming days, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee will begin its full-Covid press to approve the originalist-textualist Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States. Her lovely autumn nomination ceremony in the White House Rose Garden was a family affair, full of kind, well worded tributes and good GOP vibes. The ceremony has, in the shortest of hindsights, turned out to be a superspreader event, one that has exposed a great many attendees and their families to the coronavirus. It is a textbook case for the contact tracers, whose earnest calls to the White House have gone unanswered.
