Amy Coney Barrett

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      Senate judiciary committee votes to advance Amy Coney Barrett nomination

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      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.” More

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      Buttigieg to Fox News Sunday: Barrett nomination puts my marriage in danger

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      Pete Buttigieg, a former challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination and a member of Joe Biden’s transition team, believes his own marriage is under threat from Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Buttigieg, who married his husband Chasten in 2018, indicated that the court’s 2015 decision that made same-sex marriage legal was among a number of rulings a strong conservative majority could look to overturn.Republicans are seeking to seat Barrett before the 3 November general election. The Senate judiciary committee will vote this week on forwarding the nomination to a full floor vote.“Right now as we speak the pre-existing condition [healthcare] coverage of millions of Americans might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice,” Buttigieg said.“My marriage might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice. So many issues are on the line.”The right to same-sex marriage were enshrined in Obergefell v Hodges, the culmination of a years-long fight incorporating challenges from several states and decided by the landmark 5-4 ruling.Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said Republicans pushing through Barrett’s nomination days before the election, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, sent the wrong message to voters.“It’s not in the spirit of our constitution, or our legal system, or political system for them to do this,” he said. “Most Americans believe that the American people ought to have a say. We’re not talking about an election that’s coming up, we’re in the middle of an election, millions of Americans are voting and want their voice to be heard.”He added: “There’s an enormous amount of frustration that this Senate can’t even bring itself, with Mitch McConnell, to vote through a Covid relief package. People are suffering, people are hurting, there’s no clear end in sight.“There’s been a bill we brought to them months ago coming out of the house, they won’t touch it, they won’t do anything but suddenly they have time to rush through a nomination that the American people don’t want.“Whatever specific word you use for it, wrong is the word I would use.”Buttigieg defended himself against a claim from Wallace that he had talked about expanding the court to 15 justices, so-called court packing.“My views haven’t changed,” he said. “Bipartisan reform with the purpose of reducing the politicisation of the supreme court is a really promising idea. Let’s also be clear that a president can’t just snap their fingers and do it.” More

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      Biden says he'll lay out stance on expanding supreme court before election

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      Joe Biden said at a town hall event on Thursday night that he would announce before election day whether he favors expanding the supreme court.Biden has repeatedly declined to lay out a stance on the issue amid an ongoing Republican sprint to install a third justice nominated by Donald Trump before the election, in what critics have called a naked power grab.The Senate judiciary committee appeared poised to approve and hand off the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the full Senate next week.Barrett’s installation on the court would make for the most dramatic ideological realignment on the court in decades. In part that’s because she would replace a liberal justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.But the conservative court coup would also be the result of a successful plot by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to hold open a supreme court seat for almost a year in 2016 so that Trump could fill it instead of Barack Obama.That fact, combined with similar maneuvering by McConnell at the district and appeals court levels, have led Biden backers to express outrage that the candidate’s unwillingness to stake out a position on so-called “court-packing” would create controversy.The court has already been packed, Biden supporters say, by Trump, McConnell and their Republican surrogates and outside accomplices.In a town hall in Philadelphia on Thursday night, Biden sought to hold the focus on the Republicans’ conduct, telling host George Stephanopoulos that “no matter what answer I gave you” on court packing, “if I say it that’s going to be the headline tomorrow.’”As Stephanopoulos insisted on knowing whether Biden would encourage Congress to pass legislation to expand the court – all of this in the hypothetical instance in which Democrats win the White House in November, hold the House of Representatives, flip the Senate and then make court-packing a legislative priority – Biden said people would know how he felt “before they vote”.Barrett’s likely confirmation would establish a solid 6-3 conservative majority on the court that could last decades. Some progressives have called on the next Democratic president and Congress to add seats to the court, which would change the norm of nine seats that has been in place since 1869. Other activists have called for term limits for judges to increase court turnover.But none of those measures would be effective in the long term so long as Republicans in the Senate, whenever in the majority, refuse to fill court vacancies with judges appointed by a Democratic president and then pump those vacancies full when a Republican president takes over. More

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      Amy Coney Barrett: key moments from the supreme court confirmation hearings – video

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      Amy Coney Barrett spent most of her time avoiding key questions during three days of Senate hearings to confirm her as a supreme court justice. 
      Barrett would become the third justice on the court to be appointed by Donald Trump – and her confirmation would give conservatives a bulletproof, six-justice majority on the nine-member court, which decides cases by a simple majority.
      Barrett, a conservative Christian who has criticized the high court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA), who has publicly opposed reproductive rights and who was a trustee at a school whose handbook included a stated opposition to same-sex marriage, is seen on the left as part of a power play by Donald Trump 

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      Amy Coney Barrett

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