Senator Kamala Harris asked the above pointed question of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the hearings before his court appointment.

Caught off guard Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh floundered but eventually he conceded that he could not think of a single one.

Kavanaugh, with new addition Amy Coney Barrett, is now part of a predominantly conservative Supreme Court with the power to make decisions about the female body.

Amy Comey Barrett, the new Supreme Court justice, looks and sounds like a reasonable woman if you ignore the fact that she refused to answer a single question about how she would rule or what her true opinions are about anything during her farcical Supreme Court hearings. The great wall of deflection she built was a paper-thin disguise. 

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said about her appointment on Sunday night, “We've made an important contribution to the future of this country. A lot of what we've done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the national election. They won't be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”

It was a rare moment of gloating for McConnell. He has carefully placed Comey Barret, who believes that wives should be subservient to their husbands, like a landmine that will hamper (when it does not explode) every progressive case that comes before for decades to come.

So Comey Barrett is tasked with the removal of civil rights, not their expansion. Her job will be to drag us back to the 1950s and earlier, by reversing every progressive gain that has been made here in over seven decades.

Here is what I learned about this kind of blunt political overreach throughout the war in the North of Ireland. When a minority, in this case, conservative white voters, repeatedly dictates to the majority, things can quickly become unglued.

Fearing the erosion of their power, conservative white voters are protecting it through the courts rather than at the ballot box. 

This means that everyone who is not a white conservative has now become one of them, the people who's political power they are fighting to suppress: immigrants, LGBT, people of color, liberals, Muslims, minorities of every stripe, who taken together handily outnumber conservative white electorally. Because taken together they spell America.

I have seen what happens when a minority tries to suppress the voices of the majority. Conservative white voters may turn to Trump once again on November 3 to secure their own shrinking power base, but in doing so they will be following the path to conflict and stalemate that was taken by Ulster Unionism. 

It would be far more powerful to embrace the differences that make up the United States rather than defy them, it would be far wiser to extend the hand of friendship rather than a defiant middle finger, it would be smarter to live in the United States rather than divided blue states and red states.

Because if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are really just for the people who look and think like us, then soon they will be for no one at all.