Trump taps Barrett for Supreme Court choice
Pick sets up bitter confirmation as GOP moves to fast-track process
Three years ago, University of Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett was plucked from relative obscurity by President Donald Trump to serve as a federal appellate judge on the Chicago-based 7th Circuit.
Now, Barrett has been thrust into an even more searing national spotlight as Trump on Saturday formally nominated the South Bend judge to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“It is my honor to nominate one of our nation’s most brilliant and gifted legal minds to the Supreme Court. She is a woman
of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution,” Trump said in making the Barrett announcement in the Rose Garden, where she was joined by her husband and seven children.
“The stakes for our country are incredibly high. Rulings that the Supreme Court will issue in the coming years will decide the survival of our Second Amendment, our religious liberty, our public safety and so much more,” Trump said.“To maintain security, liberty and prosperity, we must preserve our priceless heritage of a nation of laws and there is no one better to do that than Amy Coney Barrett.”
Acknowledging what she called a “rather overwhelming occasion,” Barrett told Trump she was “deeply honored by the confidence you have placed in me.”
“I have no illusions that the road ahead of me will be easy, either for the short term or the long haul,” she said. “I never imagined that I would find myself in this position. But nowthat I am, I assure you that Iwill meet the challenge with both humility and courage.”
If Barrett is confirmed by the Senate, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will further an already massive conservative ideological restructuring of the federal judiciary that could last for decades. Barrett becomes Trump’s third nominee for the Supreme Court during his term, following confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. She would give the court a 6-3 conservative supermajority.
The effects could be farranging, most immediately on a case scheduled for November that could decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, to cases dealing with abortion and LGTBQ rights, gun control and employer-employee relations.
The nomination also has immediate political ramifications. Trump picked Barrett just 38 days before the Nov. 3 election — a move that could energize his conservative base while providing more incentive for Democrats to back former Vice President Joe Biden for the presidency. Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, sits on the Judiciary Committee.
Less than an hour before Trump made the announcement, his campaign used the nomination in a fundraising pitch. “It’s only a matter of time before the Radical Democrats start OBSTRUCTING our nominee, and it’s going to take all hands on deck if we’re going to FIGHT BACK against their unprecedented smear tactics," the email read.
Barrett’s conservatism also could become a major political issue for suburban women, a critical demographic that Trump and Republicans have seen slipping away. It’s a group that tends to be more socially moderate and one that has made the nation’s suburbs more of a political battleground as it trends Democratic.
Biden noted Barrett had critiqued the high court’s 2012 decision upholding the Affordable Care Act and said Senate Republicans should wait.
“The American people know the U.S. Supreme Court decisions affect their everyday lives. The United States Constitution was designed to give the voters one chance to have their voice heard on who serves on the court. That moment is now and their voice should be heard,” Biden said in a statement after the announcement. "The Senate should not act on this vacancy until after the American people select their next president and the next Congress.
In selecting Barrett — a devout Roman Catholic who is a favorite of social conservatives — Trump stayed true to his word to nominate a woman to replace Ginsburg, albeit one fromthe opposite end of the political spectrum.
The nomination came a day after Ginsburg, an icon for women and civil rights, became the first woman and first person of Jewish faith to lie in state in the nation’s Capitol building. Trump and Barrett each reflected on her legacy.
If confirmed by the Republican-majority U.S. Senate, Barrett would be the fifth woman in history to join the nation’s high court, and the first since Elena Kagan, who was nominated
by President Obama a decade ago.
Though Barrett has continued to live in Indiana while serving on the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, her appointment is the first with direct Chicago connections since John Paul Stevens in 1975.
Barrett, who turned 48 in January, would be the youngest jurist on the Supreme Court and could shape the country’s legal direction for decades to come.
Her selection to replace Ginsburg just weeks before a presidential election has set off political fighting between Republicans who control the Senate and the Democratic minority and is expected to lead to a fiercely contested confirmation hearing. McConnell has promised to hold a vote as soon as possible, though he has stopped short of saying it will definitely happen before voters go to the polls on Nov. 3.
Trump thanked Republican senators for a commitment to providing“a fair and timely hearing” and predicted she would easily be confirmed.
“Her qualifications are unsurpassed and her record is beyond reproach. This should be a straightforward and prompt confirmation. It should be very easy. Good luck. It’s going to be very quick. I’m sure it will be extremely noncontroversial,” said Trump, before nodding to the controversial hearings surrounding Kavanaugh. “We said that last time, didn’t we?”
Barrett said she looked forward to meeting with senators in the days ahead.
“The president has nominated me to serve on the United States Supreme Court and that institution belongs to all of us,” she said.
“If confirmed, I would not assume that role for the sake of those in my own circle and certainly not for my own sake. I would assume this role to serve you. I would discharge the judicial oath which requires me to administer justice without respect to persons, do equal rights to the poor and rich, and faithfully and impartially discharge my duties under the United States Constitution,” she said.
Democrats have protested the Republicans' rush to replace Ginsburg, saying voters should speak firstand the winner of the White House should fill the vacancy. Democrats also noted that Senate Republicans blocked Obama’s 2016 nominee, Merrick Garland, citing the election year, but won’t do the same on Trump’s pick.
Illinois' two Democratic senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, voted against Barrett’s nomination to the appellate bench three years ago. On Saturday, Duckworth said she would vote against her nomination to the nation’s highest court.
“I voted against confirming Amy Coney Barrett to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit because she failed to demonstrate the capability or willingness to serve as an impartial, fair and independent jurist,” Duckworth said in a statement. “Judge Barrett was not fit to be a circuit judge in 2017 and she is the wrong choice for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court today. Once again, she will not have my support.”
Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and a member of the Judiciary Committee, was asked on CNN prior to Trump’s announcement if Barrett was
qualified to sit on the nation’s highest court. He replied: “I don’t know the answer to that.”
Criticizing Republicans as hypocrites for trying to fast-track Barrett’s nomination before the election in contrast to blocking Garland’s nomination, Durbin said Trump’s refusal to say he would abide by the outcome of the presidential election and the president’s desire to have a justice seated in case of a disputed result were concerns.
“When you look at those statements, they are nothing short of amazing, startling, for a president to say that. I want to know what Amy Coney Barrett has to say about that. Is she ready to be on the court? I need some answers,” Illinois' senior senator said.
CNN reported a tentative schedule of Barrett meeting with McConnell on Tuesday and hearings set to begin the week of Oct. 12.
Barrett’s conservative bent and religious upbringing are sure to be hotly scrutinized, as they were three years ago during her confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit when Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California told Barrett she was concerned that “the dogma lives loudly within you.”
At the time, Barrett had no record of judicial rulings for senators to dig into. Now she brings to the national spotlight more than 100 written opinions and dissents authored over the past 2½ years offering insight into how she sees the law related to hot-button issues such as gun control, immigration and abortion.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Barrett enjoys the widespread and often passionate support of colleagues stretching back to her days as a clerk for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 20 years ago.
Fellow clerks nicknamed Barrett “The Conenator” — a play on her maiden name and reputation for destroying flimsy legal arguments.
But being a judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice, was not necessarily her first career choice. In an interview last year at an alumni function at Notre Dame Law School, Barrett said she’d relished her role as law professor and was still on a steep “learning curve” as a jurist.
“The judge thing was really out of the blue — I mean that wasn’t something that I, I’m still surprised that I’m not just a 100% full-time faculty member,” Barrett said.
Barrett’s husband, Jesse, is a former federal prosecutor now in private practice. They have seven children ranging in age from 8 to 19, including two whom the couple adopted from poverty-stricken Haiti and a young son born with developmental disabilities.
As the eldest of 29 grandchildren, Barrett, whose father also is a lawyer, has long placed an emphasis on family.
“What greater thing can you do than raise children?” she said during a 2019 interview at Notre Dame. “That’s where you can have your greatest impact on the world.”
Barrett attended an allgirls Catholic school in New Orleans before studying English and French at a liberal arts college in Memphis, Tennessee. She earned her law degree in 1997 from Notre Dame, where she saw the law as a way to use her passion for reading and writing to serve a higher
purpose.
“I liked the way that law would enable me to do the reading and writing that I loved, but alsobe involved in real-world things and have a role in shaping the world,” Barrett said.
Like Scalia, her former boss and mentor, Barrett has a conservative bent and considers herself a public meaning originalist who strictly applies the intent of the authors of the Constitution or other governing laws at the time theywere written.
Barrett’ s origin a list mindset was on display in 2018 when she cited centuriesold laws in Britain and elsewhere ina dissent over a 7th Circuit appeal involving a Wisconsin man convicted of being a felon in possession of a handgun.
While Barrett’s colleagues ruled that Wisconsin’s law barring felons from having firearms was constitutional, Barrett wrote that since the plaintiff had been convicted of a white collar crime, he wa snot inherently dangerous.
“Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons,” Barrett wrote in her dissent, which said the Wisconsin law should be declared unconstitutional. “In 1791 — and for well more than a century afterward — legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety.”
She also has written in the past about originalism as applied to the legality of the Affordable Care Act, which is due to be argued before the Supreme Court in November.
In a law review article written shortly before she joined the 7th Circuit, Barrett criticized Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. for his ruling that sustained the legislation, saying he had “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.”
“Deference to a democratic majority should not supersede a judge’s duty to apply clear text,” Barrett wrote in the 2017 article.
Of all the topics Barrett will be grilled on in her confirmation hearing, it’s the abortion issue that could prove to be the most polarizing, especially given she would potentially replace Ginsburg, a champion of women’s rights.
When Barrett was on the shortlist to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, opponents pointed to her scholarly articles and Catholic faith as suggesting she is a religious extremist who could be willing to overturn precedent and end legal abortion established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.
Her nearly three-year stint on the bench in Chicago has included at least one abortion-related case.
A 2018 ruling by a 7th Circuit panel declared unconstitutional an Indiana law requiring the burial of fetal remains after an abortion or miscarriage, which prohibited clinics from treating the remains as waste.
Barrett joined three conservative judges in asking for the ruling to be tossed and for the full court to rehear the case. They eventually issued a joint dissent that suggested they thought the Indiana law was constitutional.