With nominee set, Senate GOP prepares for swift confirmation
WASHINGTON— Senate Republicans began a furious sprint Sunday to install President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, 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 begin making the rounds on Capitol Hill 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 post-election 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 pre-election 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 conservative majority 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 anti-abortion 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 presi
dent 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 Senate Republican, 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 new polls 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.
Both sides will have plenty of help amplifying
their messages from outside groups, with the conservative Judicial Crisis Network and the liberal Demand Justice pledging tens of millions 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 outcomein the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.
McConnell’s team believes it could lose two of the party’s more moderate members, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, but no more.
Democrats, furious about what they said was a hypocritical reversal by Republicans who refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016 on the grounds that it was an election year, were still debating how to approach the confirmation process itself.