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Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is expected to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate before Election Day.
Trump has promised to push the confirmation through, saying it is necessary to have a full nine-judge panel in place to weigh in on what he anticipates will be court challenges to the Nov. 3 presidential election result, particularly related to mail-in ballots.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not yet issued a timeline of events for Barrett’s confirmation, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham said hearings will begin Oct. 12 and a vote is likely on Oct. 29, the Associated Press reported.
Only two of the 53 Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have said they oppose the idea of confirming Barrett before Election Day.
Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, urged his former colleagues in the Senate to postpone the vote on Barrett’s nomination until the presidential election is completed, pointing out that early voting is already underway in many states. So, in effect, Trump and the Senate Republicans are moving to appoint a Supreme Court Justice not just before a presidential election, but in the middle of one, he said.
Despite his urgings, conventional wisdom suggests that the Democrats have little chance of delaying the vote, let alone stopping it from happening on the GOP’s timeline.
“We can slow it down perhaps a matter of hours, maybe days at the most,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin told ABC News on Sunday, “but we can’t stop the outcome.”
Barrett, 48, is poised to be the youngest member of the Supreme Court and her confirmation would mark a return, of sorts, for her. She had been a law clerk for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch constitutional originalist – meaning his philosophy was that the text of the Constitution should be read and applied as it was originally meant at the time it was written and became law.
During the announcement of her nomination by Trump on Saturday, Barrett spoke about the influence Scalia had on her approach to the law and said that, “his judicial philosophy is mine, too.”
Barrett’s installment on the court would make her the sixth justice nominated by a Republican president – joining Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – and the sixth whose views could be described as conservative. The other three Justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, were nominated by Democratic presidents and approach the Constitution as more of a living document, the text of which is binding, but meaning of which can evolve with the times.
Barrett, a former law professor at the University of Notre Dame, has served on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since October 2017, when she was nominated to that bench by Donald Trump and confirmed by a 55-43 vote in the Senate.
She was also a finalist to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018. Trump selected Brett Kavanaugh instead.
“She interviewed with the president and impressed him and his advisers, but she also had been on the appellate bench less than a year,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “That short experience, and the prospect that she could spark a particularly bitter confirmation fight over abortion rights in a closely divided Senate, were among factors the White House considered at the time.”
Among Barrett’s publicly-stated opinions on some of the nation’s hot button topics, Barrett openly criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 opinion and decision upholding the Affordable Care Act – a chief policy target of Republicans since its passage. She wrote that he “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.”
That position has fueled concern among Democrats that her addition to the Supreme Court will act as a death knell for the Affordable Care Act. A case challenging its constitutionality is set to be heard by the court on Nov. 10.
Regarding abortion and the longstanding protections afforded to female reproductive rights under the landmark Roe v. Wade case, Barrett is known to be affiliated with organizations “that vigorously oppose it,” including Faculty for Life, an anti-abortion group at the University of Notre Dame. “But she has not said publicly she would, if given the chance, seek to scale back” reproductive rights, the Associated Press reported.
In her three years on the bench, Barrett has authored nearly 100 opinions and dissents, “in which she often illustrated Scalia’s influence by delving deep into historical minutiae to glean the meaning of original text,” also according to the Associated Press. In a 2019 dissent on a gun-rights case, she argued “a person convicted of a nonviolent felony shouldn’t be automatically barred from owning a gun. All but a few pages of her 37-page dissent were devoted to the history of gun laws in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
What do you think about Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court? Do you think she should be confirmed before Election Day? Tell us about it in the comment section below.
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