National Post (National Edition)
NOT UP TO COURTS TO MAKE `VALUE JUDGMENTS' — AMY CONEY BARRETT, U.S. SUPREME COURT NOMINEE, ON DAY ONE OF HER CONFIRMATION HEARING
Trump nominee says she will put her personal beliefs aside if confirmed to U.S. high court
WASHINGTON• U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett made her formal introduction before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, pledging to be a justice who will apply the law “as written” and paying tribute to justices across the ideological spectrum who came before her: Justices Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Barrett hewed close to her prepared remarks, which were made public on Sunday, in which she stressed her philosophy that courts were not a place where every wrong in society should be corrected.
“The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the people,” Barrett told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try.”
She noted that Scalia — for whom she clerked — believed that a judge must apply the law as written and not as he or she wished it were.
“It was the content of Justice Scalia’s reasoning that shaped me,” Barrett said.
As for her female predecessors, Barrett praised O’Connor — the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court — as a “model of grace and dignity” and paid tribute to Ginsburg’s storied career.
“I have been nominated to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat, but no one will ever take her place,” Barrett said. “I will be forever grateful for the path she marked and the life she led.”
She told the committee that the job was “not a position I had sought out” and that she “thought carefully” before accepting the nomination. Senate documents show she accepted it Sept. 21, three days after Ginsburg's death.
Barrett, who had a bout with the coronavirus earlier in the year, removed her mask when she was sworn in to deliver her own opening statement.
She nodded to six of her seven children, masked and sitting behind her except for her youngest child.
“The confirmation process — and the work of serving on the court if I am confirmed — requires sacrifices, particularly from my family,” Barrett said. “I chose to accept the nomination because I believe deeply in the rule of law and the place of the Supreme Court in our nation.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., opened Barrett's confirmation hearing Monday by acknowledging that the proceedings will surely be contentious but urging senators to hold a respectful process, saying: “Let's remember, the world is watching.”
Graham, the committee's chairman, also paid tribute to the woman whose seat Barrett would fill, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and noted that she was confirmed nearly unanimously in 1993 despite a legal resume of fighting for liberal causes.
He also defended working on a Supreme Court confirmation so close to an election, acknowledging that it has never been done beyond July of an election year but that a president is elected for four years.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, painted the GOP's move to quickly confirm Barrett as an attempt to upend the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Democrats over the past several days have agreed to hammer the health-care issue during the Barrett hearings, convinced they could turn voters away from the GOP and Trump simultaneously.
“Health-care coverage for millions of Americans is at stake in this nomination,” the Democrat from California said, noting that the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in mid-November.
Democrats have insisted Barrett recuse herself from the case, arguing that she cannot rule impartially on a law the president who nominated her has said he wants axed.
Trump, Feinstein pointed out, said eliminating the Affordable Care Act would be “a big win for the USA.”