Family Ties: Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett wants you to know she has seven children and little else. 

  As has become the custom with court nominees in their Senate hearings, Barrett declined repeatedly yesterday to talk about what she thinks about legal issues that might face the court, even though she has previously spoken out against abortion and said the court’s decision about Obamacare was decided wrongly.

 In 2017, while she was teaching law at Notre Dame, Barrett wrote that the decision of Chief Justice John Roberts that saved Obamacare “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.”

 Despite what appears to be the belief of President Trump and Barrett’s  Senate advocates, she told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that she can’t be counted on to decide cases in any predictable way, other than how she believes law and the Constitution dictate. “I never made any commitments or deals or anything like that,” she told Delaware’s Chris Coons.

  Barrett is what’s called an “originalist” or “textualist” in the mode of her hero, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. “In English, that means I interpret the Constitution as a law,” Judge Barrett said. “The text is text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. It does not change over time, and it is not up to me to update it or infuse my own views into it.”

  The trouble there is that the text is not always clear or doesn’t apply to current understanding. That’s why we have judges to interpret.

  Also, Judge Barrett also wants to remind you that she has seven children.

Viral News: The drug company Eli Lilly has paused testing of a coronavirus anti-body treatment because of a “potential safety concern.” 

  This came just a day after Johnson & Johnson announced the pause of its coronavirus vaccine trial because a volunteer got sick.  A month ago, AstraZeneca’s vaccine trial was stopped because  two participants got sick. 

  The Eli Lilly trial was for patients already being treated for Covid-19. Illnesses during tests are not unusual, and don’t necessarily mean the new drug isn’t good. It does mean you can’t produce a new drug by a predicted date, say, election day.

  This morning the US has recorded more than 54,000 new cases of the coronavirus, an upward trend of 21 percent over the past two weeks. Another 825 Americans died in the past 24 hours.

Short Count: The Supreme Court yesterday allowed the Trump administration to end the census count early while the issue is litigated in an appeals court. The count was supposed to end in August but was delayed because of the pandemic and re-scheduled a couple of times. 

  State and local leaders worry that a short count will deprive them of their rightful share of federal money over the next 10 years. The short count is also likely to skip many difficult-to-count people who tend to be Democrats, allowing representative districts to be re-drawn more in favor of Republicans.  

Unmasked: One of the repeated accusations by President Trump is that the Obama administration revealed the identities of people whose names were redacted from intelligence documents.  He has accused Obama of a political conspiracy.

  Attorney Gen. William Barr ordered an investigation into the so-called “unmasking” and it turns out that the investigation has ended without any indictments or even a public report. They found nothing. 

The Bulletin Board: The men plotting to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were also considering grabbing Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, an FBI agent testified yesterday. The so-called “Patriots” were angry with both governors about their coronavirus lockdown orders. — Apple has released its latest iPhones, the 12 series. They come without a charger.

Baked Alaska: The mayor of Anchorage, Alaska has admitted to having a “consensual, inappropriate messaging relationship” with a local television news anchor who threatened to expose him as a pedophile.

  Maria Athens, 41, the primary anchor for two stations, claimed she had a bombshell story about Mayor Ethan Berkowitz and said in a phone message laced with anti-Semitism, “I’m going to get an Emmy, so you either turn yourself in, kill yourself, or do what you need to do.”

  Investigators say they’ve found no evidence that Berkowitz has done anything criminal.

  Athens was arrested last Friday after a physical altercation with her boss at the station. One thing we know about television news; you don’t get an Emmy for punching the boss. 

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