#Amy Coney Barrett truly shines under fire in Senate hearings

In two days of Senate hearings, Amy Coney Barrett has already shown she has the right temperament — and legal chops — to serve on the Supreme Court: She isn’t ruffled or distracted by hostile questions but sticks like glue to the facts and the law.

At the same time, Democrats have shown they have no good reason to reject her: Their toughest line of attack has been to suggest she might not vote the way they’d like on an ObamaCare case or if the election comes before the high court.

Continuing the Dems’ farce from the first day of hearings, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and others Tuesday cited people who’d suffer if the court strikes down the Affordable Care Act, while Sen. Chris Coons (Del.) ludicrously insisted that brief comments Barrett once made about Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 ruling on the ACA proves she’d vote against it in a new case.

Barrett calmly, but sternly, brought the discussion back to Earth: “I am not on a mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act,” she said. And she couldn’t have been more forceful about judges’ duty not to impose their own views or to rule to produce a certain policy outcome. On any issue.

“Judges cannot just wake up one day and say, ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion,’ and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” she explained. They had to rule on the law. As she would.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, meanwhile, spoke endlessly — with charts worthy of the crankiest conspiracy theorist — of some supposedly nefarious network of “dark” money to get conservatives on the bench. Which, of course, had nothing to do with Barrett’s qualifications. And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) squashed his whole point, by noting that progressives have amassed far more “dark” cash on the other side.

If this is all the Dems have, Barrett should sail through the rest of the hearings.