Dems boycott as Barrett pushed through
WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to approve President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, with majority Republicans pushing past a Democratic boycott and the panel’s rules to recommend her confirmation.
The lopsided 12-0 tally set the stage for a consequential vote to confirm Barrett on Monday, a month to the day after the president announced her nomination to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It reflected the deep partisan polarization gripping the Senate as Republicans rush to cement a 6-3 conservative majority on the court and score a coveted achievement eight days before the election.
“This is why we all run,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chairman of the committee, exulted just before pushing through her nomination. “It’s moments like this that make everything you go through matter.”
The all-but-certain confirmation of Barrett, 48, an appeals court judge who has styled herself in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, will most likely shape American society for decades to come. It has potentially sweeping implications for corporate power and the environment, abortion rights and gay rights, and a wide range of other policy issues, including health care access, gun rights and religious freedom.
Democrats, livid over the speedy process, spurned the vote altogether and forced Republicans to bypass their own longstanding committee rules requir
ing at least two members of the minority to be present to transact business.
“Democrats will not lend a single ounce of legitimacy to this sham vote in the Judiciary Committee,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said at a news conference on the steps of the Capitol, where he raised his voice to be heard over the cries of protesters opposed to the nomination.
“We are voting with our feet,” Schumer said. “We are standing together. And we are standing against this mad rush to jam through a Supreme Court nomination just days — days — before an
election.”
Even as the panel prepared to meet, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, pledged that if elected, he would establish a bipartisan commission to study whether to expand or otherwise restructure the courts. The issue is a top priority of liberal activists who have been outraged by Republicans’ drive to stack the judiciary with conservatives.
The maneuver by Senate Democrats on Thursday kicked off a weekend-long barrage of dilatory tactics that they were planning to stir up liberal outrage over Barrett’s nomination in the final days
of the 2020 balloting. Without the votes to block the judge in either the committee or the full Senate, though, Democrats’ actions were purely symbolic.
Democrats have sharply opposed Barrett on policy grounds. But their goal Thursday was to tarnish the legitimacy of her confirmation, arguing that Republicans had no right to fill the seat vacated just over amonth ago by the death of Ginsburg, when millions of Americans were already voting.
They were particularly angry that Republicans had reversed themselves since 2016, when they refused to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, citing the election about eight months later.
Inside the hearing room where the vote unfolded, Democrats’ empty chairs held large posters of Americans whose health care coverage they insisted could evaporate if Trump’s nominee were to side with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act when the court hears a Republican challenge to the law next month.
Republicans dismissed the Democrats’ boycott as a childish stunt.
“This is all for show,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “This is to try to capture a narrative which is simply false and to cover up what they are really about.”
Cornyn and other Republicans said the public should be wary of what they asserted was Democrats’ real intention: to expand the size of the Supreme Court and stock it with liberal justices if they reclaim the White House and the Senate majority.
It is far from clear whether Democrats could accomplish such a politically costly task, or if party leaders agree with progressives that they even ought to try. Biden’s promise of a commission, after weeks of dodging questions on the topic, suggested that hewould try to bide his time.
“I will ask them to, over 180 days, come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it’s getting out of whack,” Biden, a former Judiciary Committee chairman, told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, according to an interview excerpt that is scheduled to be broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes.”