President Trump nominates Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court

On Monday, Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s nominee to take Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, was officially confirmed and sworn in. Barrett’s controversial confirmation was the final chapter of the spectacle surrounding her rapid nomination and confirmation, especially so close to a presidential election. And it only further served to reignite the extremely polarized conversation around Barrett’s religion that has been building since 2017.

Barrett is a devout Catholic. She has written before about her belief that Catholicism should affect a judge’s jurisprudence, and Democrats discussed her views widely when she was nominated to the federal bench in 2017. In a moment that has become infamous on the right, Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared that “the dogma lives loudly within you” during Barrett’s hearing, a phrase some conservatives took to be an attack on Barrett’s Catholicism.

On Monday, by a narrow vote of 52 to 48, the US Senate confirmed Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

The 48-year-old Barrett was appointed by Trump to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, and was also reportedly a finalist for Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat in 2018. She has been portrayed as a favorite of social conservatives seeking to push against the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence. She is unusual, compared especially to famously (and perhaps strategically) tight-lipped recent nominees like Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan, for her extensive paper trail on questions of constitutional law. As a legal academic, she’s written extensively on what obedience to the original meaning of the Constitution requires of judges and members of Congress; how to reconcile the importance of precedent with allegiance to the Constitution’s original meaning; and how precedent can be used to mediate deep disagreements about the law.

Author’s note, October 27: This conversation occurred in October 2018, shortly after Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. After Amy Coney Barrett’s rushed confirmation to the Court, just a week before the 2020 election, it feels newly relevant.

When he was arguing for the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the judiciary “will always be the least dangerous branch to the political rights of the Constitution,” in part because he believed the federal courts would stand above the political fray and act as a bulwark against tyranny from all directions.

President Trump has repeatedly promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established the right to an abortion in America. By putting Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Court, he moved one step closer to that goal.

Barrett, who was confirmed by the Senate on Monday, attracted praise from social conservatives for her religious faith as well as her strict interpretation of the Constitution. As a judge on the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, she issued conservative decisions in cases involving the Second Amendment and immigration, among others. But her views on abortion got particular attention during her confirmation process, given the president’s promise on Roe and the political importance of the issue in an election year.

In 2016, President Trump lost the national popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He lost it by a lot — 2,865,075 votes, to be precise.

Meanwhile, the Senate just voted to confirm Trump’s third nominee to the Supreme Court. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) crossing over to vote with all 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus.

In a narrow 52-48 vote, the Senate has officially confirmed Amy Coney Barrett for appointment to the Supreme Court, a huge win for Republicans who worked quickly — and ignored past precedent — to advance her nomination.

Barrett, who will now take the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a staunch conservative whose vote could be the deciding one on upcoming cases involving the Affordable Care Act, abortion rights, and voting rights. Her confirmation solidifies a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, and is likely to affect its skew for decades.

Amy Coney Barrett’s likely confirmation to the Supreme Court to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a final Senate floor vote on Monday will add a conservative sixth vote to an already-conservative majority, with potentially far-reaching implications for American law. Barrett’s confirmation will scramble the current distribution of power on the Court, displacing the chief justice as its putative center and pulling it rightward.

Most legal commentators expect that Barrett’s judicial philosophy of originalism and her advocacy of a more “flexible” approach to precedent will make her more likely to vote to overturn precedents like Roe v. Wade. Barrett also believes that judges should interpret statutes in accord with their “original public meaning,” a strict brand of textualism that tends to constrain agency regulatory power.

The Senate voted to end its debate over the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Sunday afternoon, a move that sets the stage for a final Senate floor vote for her confirmation on Monday.

Despite efforts by Democratic lawmakers to use procedural maneuvers to slow her appointment, Barrett is on track to be confirmed to the court just about a week before Election Day with almost unanimous support from Senate Republicans.

The unusual nature of Thursday’s committee vote on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett underscored just how willing Senate Republicans are to continue disregarding established rules. Not a single Democratic senator was present — and Republicans moved forward anyway.

The panel approved Barrett’s nomination 12-10 along party lines, bringing her one step closer to a confirmation vote expected to happen next Monday. But they did so despite a Democratic boycott of the meeting, which meant they didn’t have the required number of minority members that’s usually needed to conduct business.

Step one on the all-but-certain path to Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court — a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee — is officially complete.

Her nomination to fill the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat now heads to a committee vote next Thursday, and a full Senate vote shortly after that. Barring any significant changes in the interim, she’s widely expected to get confirmed, though Democrats are weighing some procedural maneuvers to express their opposition.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to appoint nominees who would “do the right thing unlike Bush’s appointee John Roberts on ObamaCare.” Chief Justice John Roberts famously voted to preserve most of the Affordable Care Act (the ACA) in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), and later rejected arguments in another partisan lawsuit, King v. Burwell (2015), seeking to undercut the law.

Like Trump, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is a critic of Roberts’s decisions upholding most of Obamacare. In a book review published in 2017, for example, Barrett denounced Roberts’s opinions in both NFIB and King, claiming the chief justice “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute” in the first decision.

During her confirmation hearing this week, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett declined to stake out a position on the existence of climate change, describing it as a “very contentious matter of public debate.”

“I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial because that is inconsistent with the judicial role,” she added in response to questions from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).

Senators on Wednesday had one more chance to press Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on a range of issues including voting rights, health care, and executive power — questions she, once again, broadly declined to answer.

The second and final day of questions during Barrett’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee went much like the first. On subjects such as the president’s ability to pardon himself, mail-in voting, and climate change, Barrett — like other judicial nominees before her — said she couldn’t provide a viewpoint because she needed to maintain impartiality in case she was asked to consider a related challenge if confirmed.

While discussing LGBTQ rights, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Tuesday used a term that LGBTQ activists have called “offensive,” “outdated,” and a “dog whistle.”

“I have no agenda, and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference,” Barrett said, when asked about her stance on preserving protections for members of the LGBTQ community.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett spent much of the first day of questions in her confirmation hearing invoking what’s known as the “Ginsburg rule” and refusing to provide a position on whether she agreed with past precedents. It’s an approach made famous by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (though she actually spoke much more freely on some subjects) — and it provides little additional insight regarding Barrett’s positions on issues including reproductive rights and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Barrett did, however, comment more broadly. She noted that she was not “hostile” to the ACA, despite criticizing past decisions that upheld the law. She also said repeatedly that she did not have an “agenda” to overturn Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 decision that reaffirmed someone’s right to an abortion, though her past opinions signal an openness to limiting these rights.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett has seven children.

If you didn’t know that before the Senate Judiciary Committee began confirmation hearings on her Supreme Court nomination, you definitely do now, since her large family has been mentioned at least nine times as of Tuesday afternoon.

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett delivered her opening statement in her Senate confirmation hearing this Monday — a relatively straightforward recounting of her life story and her position on the role of the courts — setting the stage for intensive questioning yet to come this week.

Democrats have expressed widespread opposition to Barrett’s nomination, and emphasized that she could solidify a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court that could overturn the Affordable Care Act and undo Roe v. Wade. In her opening remarks, Barrett did not touch on specific cases or issue areas, but emphasized that she viewed the Court’s role as a body that’s not intended to create policy — a commonly used Republican talking point.

The opening day of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing felt both surreal and oddly routine.

About a week and a half after two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee tested positive for the coronavirus, masked lawmakers gathered to make opening statements, with some including Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Kamala Harris (D-CA) appearing remotely. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — one of the Republican lawmakers to be recently diagnosed with coronavirus — returned to make his statement in person after being cleared by the Capitol’s attending physician, who noted that he did not need to take an additional test (Lee has not shared whether he has recently tested negative).

The first day of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing was a mind-numbing series of opening statements from senators — traditionally, the nominee doesn’t actually face questions until the second day — with Democrats largely focusing on the danger that Barrett would vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, claimed they were outraged by suggestions that the Supreme Court engages in policymaking or even rank politics. The most explicit of these claims came from Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on Monday plainly explained the problem with Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing: “This is not normal.”

In his opening statement, Booker directly called out Senate Republicans’ attempts to rush through her confirmation less than 30 days ahead of the general election, after refusing to hold hearings for President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016. He noted, too, how the Senate is focusing on a Supreme Court nominee even as millions of Americans are in need of more coronavirus stimulus money, which Republicans in the upper chamber have been chief opponents toward. And he questioned Republicans’ decision to hold the hearing despite two members of the committee testing positive for the coronavirus about a week and a half ago.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings begin on Monday, and it’s a safe bet that we’ll hear one word over and over again over the next few days: “originalism.” Barrett is a self-proclaimed originalist, embracing a theory of the Constitution that is also shared by at least two other sitting justices: Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

Originalism, in Barrett’s words, is the belief that “constitutional text means what it did at the time it was ratified and that this original public meaning is authoritative.” Judges, originalists maintain, should be bound by the words of the Constitution, and the meaning of those words should be determined solely based on how they were understood when they were added to the Constitution.

Despite the recent concerns about coronavirus exposure at the Capitol — and the fast-approaching general election — the Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is still happening.

The hearing will air Monday, October 12, through Thursday, October 15, beginning at 9 am each day. It will be accessible via a livestream on the Senate Judiciary Committee website, as well as via C-SPAN.

Twenty-two years ago Amy Coney Barrett, then a law clerk soon to enter the legal academy, co-authored an article called “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases.” The topics raised were intensely debated in 2017 when she was nominated to serve on the federal bench, and are being debated again now that she has been nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

Barrett wrote the article with John Garvey, her soon-to-be colleague at Notre Dame’s law school (he’s now the president of Catholic University), and in it they concluded that “Catholic judges (if they are faithful to the teaching of their church) are morally precluded from enforcing the death penalty.” The article is a model of serious scholarship — analytically precise, willing to take clear positions on important and controversial questions.

With the number of Republican senators testing positive for Covid-19 growing by the day, the US Senate won’t come back until October 19, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on Saturday.

Even so, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are still moving forward with their October 12 Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Amy Coney Barrett — even though two Republican members of the committee have tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham announced that he won’t be changing his plans for the Supreme Court confirmation process at this point.

The confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was set to begin in a little over a week, on Monday, October 12. Friday’s news prompted questions about whether this schedule would shift, given concerns about senators’ exposure to coronavirus and their ability to fully participate in the process.