Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee voted unilaterally Thursday to advance Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court nomination to the full Senate despite Democrats’ refusal to sit in the hearing room for what they called a naked “power grab”.
Democratic senators had announced the night before that they would not participate in any move to install Donald Trump’s third supreme court nominee even as tens of millions of Americans vote in a presidential election less than two weeks away.
No supreme court nominee has ever been installed so close to a presidential election, and just four years ago the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and Senator Lindsey Graham, who now chairs the judiciary committee, said that installing such a nominee in an election year would be a shameful defiance of the will of voters.
Those qualms were nowhere in evidence on Thursday as Republicans, who hold a majority in the Senate and thus on every committee, met with themselves to send Barrett toward a seat vacated with the death last month of liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“My Democratic Senate colleagues and I boycotted the supreme court nominee committee vote today,” Democratic vice-presidential nominee and California senator Kamala Harris tweeted. “Let’s be clear: this nomination process is a sham and shows how Republicans will stop at nothing to strip health care from millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.”
Senators plan to convene a rare weekend session for procedural actions ahead of a final confirmation vote expected Monday. McConnell has said he has the votes to confirm Barrett, whose arrival on the court would create an unassailable 6-3 conservative majority.
“Barrett deserves to be on the supreme court and she will be confirmed,” said Graham. Democrats, he said, “made a choice not to participate”.
Democratic senators on the committee spoke outside the Capitol later Thursday morning about what they said was a broken process demanded by a corrupt president and engineered by a Republican majority that had lost its way in a desperate attempt to hold onto power despite dwindling popular support.
“We are descending into the low ground, the quicksand of a power grab, that will go down in history as one of the darker days of this institution,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said.
In their committee room seats, Democrats arranged for posters to be placed of constituents they said had been helped by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which they fear Barrett, 48, could help throw out in a case that begins oral arguments next month, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Barrett is a conservative whose anti-abortion views and ties to groups that have publicly opposed same-sex marriage raised alarm among progressives, as well as her unwillingness to comment on the legality of voter intimidation or to promise to recuse herself from any case arising from the coming election.
Nan Aron, president of the progressive Alliance for Justice group, said Republicans had conducted “theater”, as opposed to a real hearing.
“Senate Republicans believe ‘advice and consent’ means performing the theatre of a hearing without scrutinizing the nominee in the least,” Aron said in a statement. “Amy Coney Barrett refused to answer the most fundamental questions about our democracy and human rights. Today’s vote shows Senate Republicans are already confident that she will advance their agenda.”
But Jeanne Mancini, president of the anti-abortion group March for Life, praised Barrett and compared her favorably to Ginsburg.
“Like her predecessor, Amy Coney Barrett is a trailblazer who is a role model for Americans,” Mancini said in a statement. “Her immense respect for the law and constitution will allow her to fairly apply the law and consider the rights of everyone who comes before her, including the unborn.”
Trump is on track to becoming the first president in decades to appoint three supreme court justices in just one term, and he has shattered records for the speed with which he has remade the judiciary, installing more than 200 federal judges with McConnell’s help.
Previous Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh joined the supreme court in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
In her confirmation hearings, Barrett declined to say how she would rule in potential future challenges to the landmark Roe v Wade decision in 1973 that made abortion legal in the US, or other landmark reproductive rights cases.
But progressives and mainstream legal analysts said her views on those and other issues appeared to be extreme, and they expressed concern that she could participate in the dismantling of environmental regulations, voting rights law, anti-discrimination protections, protections for immigrants and other essential safeguards.
“It is an irresponsible and undemocratic abuse of power to see the Republican Senate leadership on the judiciary committee rush to fill Justice Ruth Ginsburg’s seat in the middle of an election and instead of providing coronavirus relief for the millions of families harmed by the pandemic and the economic crisis,” said Tina Tchen, president of the anti-sexual harassment group Time’s Up Now.
“This sham process is preventing the American public from understanding how her extreme views are out of step with our constitutional values and principles.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
