Absolutely awful, but I do have some personal sympathy for her because of Feinstein's disgusting religion-baiting attacks on her during her Seventh Circuit confirmation.
I think Feinstein’s line of questioning was perfectly legitimate. I will stand corrected if the truth is otherwise, but as far as I can remember she did not lean into the “taking orders from Rome” trope, and her questioning could have applied equally to a Protestant or Muslim as a Catholic. ACB has expressed a worrying opposition to church-state separation, and keeping her religious views out of her rulings, and she should expect to be questioned on it.
I might have felt differently about Feinstein's questions if the substantive issue behind them had been something else. What she was asking Barrett about was an article arguing that Catholic judges should recuse themselves in capital cases due to the Church's opposition to capital punishment, meaning that Feinstein was attacking a conservative jurist for being critical of the death penalty but framing the question in a way that made her look like the woke one. Classic DiFi bullsh**t.
It had nothing to do with the death penalty. That just happened to be what she was writing about. The idea was “If you are going to apply this line of reasoning to the death penalty, what else will you let your religion influence as a judge? Abortion? Contraception?” Etc.
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