Barrett, Nearing Confirmation, Lauded as ‘Unashamedly Pro-Life’
Barrett’s Answers Leave Little for Democrats to Use Against Her
(Bloomberg) -- Amy Coney Barrett would make history on the U.S. Supreme Court as a conservative, “unashamedly pro-life” woman, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee said, as Democrats tried for a second day to pin down how she would handle cases on abortion, voting rights and the Affordable Care Act.
Barrett, who is on track to be confirmed before Americans choose the next president on Nov. 3, continued to sidestep questions about how she would vote in cases likely to come before the court. But she said she wasn’t calling for the court to adopt a more aggressive approach toward overturning its precedents, and she declined to endorse her onetime mentor’s searing criticism of the landmark Voting Rights Act.
Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said Barrett represents “the first time in American history that we’ve nominated a woman who’s unashamedly pro-life and embraces her faith without apology.” At the same time, he stressed she has pledged to put aside her personal views when making rulings.
“This hearing to me is an opportunity to not punch through a glass ceiling, but a reinforced concrete barrier around conservative women,” Graham said. “You’re going to shatter that barrier.”
Voting Rights Act
Under questioning Wednesday, Barrett wouldn’t directly say whether she agreed with her one-time boss, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, when he called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” in a 2013 argument. The Supreme Court in that case struck down a core provision of the landmark law, passed in 1965 to protect the rights of Black voters at the polling place.
“When I said that Justice Scalia’s philosophy is mine, too, I certainly didn’t mean to say that every sentence that came out of Justice Scalia’s mouth or every sentence that he wrote is one that I would agree with,” Barrett said. She called the law “a triumph in the civil rights movement.”
Barrett also rejected suggestions that she was pushing to make the court more willing to overturn its precedents. In a 2013 law review article she wrote that a Supreme Court justice should “enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it.”
But Barrett said Wednesday she “wasn’t arguing for any alteration” in the rules governing preservation of the court’s precedents. “I was saying this is how it is, this is how the Supreme Court does it, and that’s right,” she said.
Democrats also have been trying to pin down Barrett on her views of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. On Tuesday, Barrett downplayed a law review article in which she seemed to take issue with Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2012 opinion upholding the health-care law. She said her critique didn’t address the key issue that will be before the court when it hears a new challenge to the law a week after Election Day.
And on the possibility of the high court being asked to weigh in on challenges to the presidential election results -- as President Donald Trump has predicted -- Barrett refused to say whether she would disqualify herself from considering such cases. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, called her response on recusal “boilerplate.”
Barrett declined to clarify her position on the Chevron deference, the legal precedent that gives agencies wide latitude to interpret ambiguous statutes. She initially declined as well to weigh in on whether a president should commit to a peaceful transfer of power, calling it a “political controversy” involving Trump that she didn’t want to be drawn into, before saying that the tradition of respecting the will of voters is “one of the beauties of America.”
Barrett will complete her testimony later Wednesday, and then the committee will hear from outside witnesses tomorrow.
Graham says he will move on Thursday set a committee vote to advance her nomination to the full Senate on Oct. 22. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has signaled he’ll set the stage for a full Senate vote the following week.
If confirmed, Barrett would succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose Sept. 18 death silenced one of court’s leading liberal voices. That would give the Supreme Court a 6-3 conservative majority. Several Democrats painted Barrett as an unworthy successor. “You would be the polar opposite of Justice Ginsburg,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
But Barrett invoked Ginsburg while explaining why she was reluctant to reveal more about what sort of justice she’d be. “Justice Ginsburg, with her characteristic pithiness, used this to describe how a nominee should comport herself at a hearing: ‘no hints, no previews, no forecasts,’” Barrett said.
Senator Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, told Barrett that Ginsburg “was much more forthcoming at her confirmation hearing about the essential rights of women.”
Republicans on the panel, including Graham, said the 48-year-old Barrett is well qualified for the Supreme Court. She’s served for three years as a federal appeals court judge and has spent years teaching at Notre Dame Law School in South Bend, Indiana.
Democrats worked to avoid attacking the personal views of Barrett, a devout Roman Catholic who personally opposes abortion, during the proceedings, focusing instead on her writings and views on the law.
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