Senate Republicans plot swift confirmation
WASHINGTON » Senate Republicans began a furious sprint Sunday to install President Donald Trump’s Supreme Courtnominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, before an election just 37 days away, laying the groundwork for an extraordinarily swift and politically divisive confirmation battle.
Their confidence mounting that they could hold together a narrow majority over the objections of outraged Democrats, Republicans were planning one of the fastest confirmation processes in recent decades. It could play out in a little more than half the time of the average recent nomination to the court and set a new precedent: In 244 years, no justice has ever been confirmed so close to an election.
White House officials were already arranging for Barrett to beginmaking the rounds on CapitolHill beginning Tuesday, and Republicans planned to hold four days of nationally televised public hearings the week of Oct. 12. They are aiming for a vote on the Senate floor by late October, just days before the election Nov. 3 and in time for her to be seated before any postelection legal challenges to the vote and a consequential hearing on the looming challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, had not yet publicly committed to a preelection vote, out of concern that with such a compressed timeline and slim voting majority, any contingency could make it impossible. But with the possibility of a 6-3 conservativemajority in reach which could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and much more Republicans were quickly uniting with nearly monolithic support.
Their ambitious timetable began in earnest Saturday when Trump presented Barrett, a federal appeals court judge in Chicago and favorite of conservative Christians and antiabortion activists, as his choice to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died this month at 87.
Republicans heaped praise on Barrett, 48, comparing her, somewhat incongruently, both to Ginsburg, a pioneering advocate of women’s rights, and Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative legal icon for whom Barrett once clerked.
“We have been really clear as Republicans throughout that we think the biggest impact a president can have long term, over many, many decades, is who they put on the Supreme Court and other federal courts,” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 SenateRepublican, said in an interview.
In moving so quickly, Trump and Senate Republicans were taking on significant political risk at a time when they were already lagging behind their Democratic challengers. A group of newpolls released Sunday, including by The New York Times and Siena College, found a clear majority of voters believe the winner of the presidential election should fill the seat, and Barrett’s nearly uniform support for conservative positions many of them unpopular will stoke heated debates over abortion rights, health care and gay rights that could alienate swing voters, even if it rallies the Republican base.
Democrats, resigned to their inability to stop Barrett, focused instead on extracting the maximum political benefit fromthe fight over her confirmation, zeroing in on the nominee’s dim view of the Affordable Care Act in an effort they believe could win them control of the Senate and the White House.
“A vote for Amy Coney Barrett is a dagger aimed at the heart of the health care protections Americans so desperately need andwant,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters in his home state Saturday.
Schumer was even more explicit in a letter circulated to Senate colleagues, arguing that “the best strategy for fighting back” was “health care, health care, health care” an issue on which Democrats already have voters’ trust and a track record of winning congressional seats.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has embraced that strategy. In a speech Sunday in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden argued that Republicans had a single goal in nominating Barrett: eliminating the health law they have spent years trying unsuccessfully to tear down.
“I am focused on
one
thing right now,” Biden said. “I’m focused on making sure the American people understand that they’re being cut out of this process they’re entitled to be part of. And the cutout is designed in order to take away the ACA and your health care in the midst of a pandemic.”
The party has made similar arguments about previous nominees to the court. But Barrett’s views on the Affordable Care Act are unusually clear, and their impacts could be immediate: The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a challenge to the legislation by the Trump administration and Republican attorneys general in November, days after the election.
Democrats pointed to a 2017 law review article in which Barrett, who was not yet on the bench, criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 opinion upholding one of the health care law’s central provisions. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” she wrote.
Senate Republicans have largely tried to steer clear of an issue they see as a political liability, but not Trump, who said on Twitter on Sunday that if the court “terminated” the law, it would be “a bigWIN for the USA.” He promised to replace it with “a MUCH better, and FAR cheaper, alternative,” but so far the president has offered only
a vague and symbolic plan.
Both sides will have plenty of help amplifying theirmessages fromoutside groups, with the conservative Judicial Crisis Network and the liberal Demand Justice pledging tens ofmillions of dollars in spending on television ads in politically competitive states across the country.
If the political impact of the hearings remained uncertain, though, few in either party doubted the ultimate outcome in the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53- 47majority.
McConnell’s teambelieves it could lose two of the party’s more moderate members, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, but no more.