Barrett Nomination Clears Panel With Democrats Boycotting
Senate Republicans are steaming ahead with plans to elevate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
(Bloomberg) -- The Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, setting up a final Senate vote to confirm President Donald Trump’s choice a week before the U.S. election.
All 12 GOP senators on the panel voted in favor of Barrett’s nomination. Democrats boycotted the vote. The committee’s action means that the conservative judge’s confirmation is cruising toward a rapid finish on Monday, eight days before Election Day.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham heralded Barrett’s expected elevation, saying it’s historic to have a woman on the court who personally opposes abortion, although she pledged to set aside her views in her work on the court.
“She will take her job on without an agenda. But the important thing to me is that it’s important to be a complete person and be on the Supreme Court,” Graham said. “It’s OK to be pro-life. She embraces the pro-life cause in her personal life but she understands judging is not a cause. It is a process.”
Barrett’s confirmation is proceeding over Democratic objections to what they say is a rushed process, and their concerns about her potential impact on rulings including those related to the Affordable Care Act, civil rights, abortion and lawsuits that might erupt from the 2020 elections.
“On issue after issue, this nominee is so far out of the mainstream that her views, if she had to get hem to pass in a legislature, would never pass, even with all Republicans,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday. “But, of course, now they’re rushing through the process.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to hold a Senate vote Friday advancing the nomination to Senate floor, and the chamber will remain in session through the weekend as Republicans run down the amount of time required for debate. McConnell says he’s aiming for a final vote on the confirmation on Monday.
Barrett, a 48-year-old appellate court judge, mother of seven, devout Roman Catholic and former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, is Trump’s nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and is the late liberal justice’s ideological opposite.
The president cheered the committee’s vote Thursday, saying it marked a “Big day for America!”
Her installation on the Supreme Court would cap a conservative transformation of the U.S. court system under Trump, with the Senate already having confirmed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, along with 53 appellate court and 161 district court judges.
Barrett’s nomination is a focal point for Trump’s re-election campaign and that of congressional Republicans. Conservative groups backing Barrett will have spent almost $30 million by the end of the month to promote her confirmation, including advertising and events mostly in key election battlegrounds.
Graham, who’s in his own tight re-election race, used the committee meeting to warn against Democratic wins in November. He said, without evidence, that if Democrats gain the White House and Senate in the elections, they would add more Supreme Court justices to water down the conservative majority that Barrett’s confirmation would achieve.
In two days of questioning last week, Barrett stressed she would be independent. She deflected questions on how she might rule on issues ranging from abortion to voting rights to health care. She also distanced herself from some of her past positions expressed mostly through law journal pieces.
While saying she wasn’t calling for the court to be more aggressive in overturning its precedents, she declined to include cases involving access to abortion and contraception rights among “super-precedents,” meaning those unthinkable to overturn.
Democrats, who’ve conceded they don’t have the votes to defeat Barrett, used the hearings to highlight her potential impact on the ACA, their leading issue in elections that will determine White House and Senate control.
Barrett likely would be on the court when it hears arguments Nov. 10 in a case that could undo the law known as Obamacare, which provides health insurance for 20 million Americans. She’s criticized Chief Justice John Roberts for a 2012 high court majority opinion he wrote the upheld the core of the ACA.
Committee Democrats put in their vacant chairs pictures of people they say count on the ACA for access to health care.
Bitterness Over Garland
Barrett has served as an appeals court judge for three years and teaches at Notre Dame Law School. Republicans say she’s clearly qualified and knows how to separate personal views that include opposition to abortion from her judicial decisions. They also argued they have a mandate to confirm her so swiftly and shortly before the next president is selected, after voters in 2016 and 2018 handed Republicans more power in the White House and Senate.
Democrats say the hasty process is hypocritical, after Republicans in 2016 refused to even meet with President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, nine months before the elections. They’ve argued the next president should make the appointment.
McConnell succeeded in changing Senate rules in 2017 to eliminate the filibuster of Supreme Court confirmations, effectively allowing judges to clear with 51 votes rather than 60 earlier needed to end opponents’ delaying tactics. Both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh needed that change to win final approval, and Barrett will as well.
“The American people know what’s going on -- they’re not fooled, they know it’s a sham,” Schumer said outside the Capitol after the committee meeting. “To call this confirmation illegitimate is actually too kind.”
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.