Carrie Campbell Severino accurately described Vanita Gupta’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee as rife with “obfuscation and double standards.” The obfuscation continued in her answers to written questions, as I demonstrated here.
The same is true of the double standards. When Gupta was obsessed with opposing President Trump’s judicial nominees (around 70 of them, I understand), she blasted them for their responses to the question of whether Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided. The Trump nominees answered that they would follow Brown as settled law and binding precedent, but did not want to give “a thumbs up or a thumbs down” (to use Elena Kagan’s words) to particular Supreme Court decisions.
Gupta lashed out at Trump nominees for this answer. In a letter to the Senate, she announced that by not declaring Brown to be correctly decided, these nominees failed to meet the “moral floor” for a federal judgeship. Gupta construed this “failure” as evidence of a desire to roll back federal civil rights protections.
Accordingly, in his written questions to Gupta, Sen. Grassley asked her to answer yes or no whether a series of cases, starting with Brown, was correctly decided. Gupta answered:
If confirmed as a Department of Justice official, I will seek to ensure that the Department follows Supreme Court precedent as the law of the land.
She would not say whether Brown was correctly decided.
Thus, unless Gupta believes that the moral floor for being a top Justice Department official is lower than that for being a judge, Gupta, by her own standards, fails to meet the “moral floor” for the DOJ job she covets. Furthermore, by her own standards, Gupta’s answer to Grassley’s question about Brown v. Board can be viewed as evidence that she wants to roll back civil rights protections (as she likely does for groups not favored by the left).
Double standards also drive Gupta’s view of whether apologies offered by nominees should be considered sincere. During the Trump years, Gupta believed they shouldn’t be, even if the apology was for something a nominee wrote while in college. Yet, at her confirmation hearing, she wanted Senators to accept as sincere the apology she offered for the viciousness with which she attacked political adversaries.
When Sen. Lee asked Gupta whether her apologies should be held to the same standard she had insisted on for other nominees, the best she could do was to mutter something about “a second chance.”
Yet, when given another chance to take a consistent position on apologies and “second chances,” Gupta didn’t take it. In his written questions, Lee asked her whether the nominee she had excoriated for his college writings deserved a second chance. Gupta would not say that he did.
Perhaps Gupta now believes she has the votes needed for confirmation, and thus can back to being her nasty self.
I hope she doesn’t have the votes. Her hyper-partisan viciousness is on a par with that of Neera Tanden, whom the Senate rejected on that basis. And Gupta’s views on substantive matters are well to the left of Tanden’s.
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