President Trump has named Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his choice to replace late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court — a long-sought victory for conservatives and the anti-abortion movement.
Trump, praising his nominee as “one of our nation’s most brilliant and gifted legal minds,” made her candidacy official in a Rose Garden ceremony Saturday.
“Amy Coney Barrett will decide cases based on the text of the Constitution as written,” he said. “As Amy has said, being a judge takes courage. You are not there to decide cases as you prefer but to do your duty and follow the law wherever it may take you.”
He also noted that Barrett will be the first mother with school-age children ever to serve as a Supreme Court justice.
“Thank you for sharing your incredible mom with our country,” he told the seven Barrett children, who sat in the crowd with their father and First Lady Melania Trump.
Barrett followed the president with a brief acceptance speech.
“I love the United States, and I love the United States Constitution,” she declared.
She praised her predecessor, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a woman who “not only broke glass ceilings, she smashed them. For that she has won the admiration of women across the country and indeed all over the world.”
Barrett’s nomination seals one of the most ambitious promises of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign: the conservative transformation of the federal judiciary. If she is confirmed, the court would lean to the right, six justices to three, for years to come.
The 48-year-old mother of seven would be the Court’s youngest justice by five years. The lifetime appointment could mean a decades-long tenure that would remake American jurisprudence for a generation.
Barrett, a first-in-her-class graduate of Notre Dame Law School, would also be the only non-Ivy Leaguer on the nation’s highest court — a subtle nod to Trump’s populist base.
The choice cements Trump’s bond with the religious right, a key Republican constituency, just five weeks before Election Day.
Conservative Christians have claimed Barrett as a heroine since 2017, when Trump nominated her to a seat on the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
At her confirmation hearing, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) grilled Barrett on her Catholic faith. “The conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern,” Feinstein said — a comment that, to Republicans, smacked of an unconstitutional religious test for the office.
“Barrett is the ultimate deliverable for the pro-life movement,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told The Post. “For conservatives, Barrett is the trifecta with the two prior Trump nominees,” Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
She is seen as a judge in the originalist mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she served as a clerk before launching a celebrated career in academia. In her remarks Saturday, Barrett confirmed that expectation.
“His judicial philosophy is mine too: judges must apply the law as written,” she said. “Judges are not policy makers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold.”
Barrett became a professor of law at Notre Dame and a noted legal scholar of statutory and constitutional interpretation, known for incisive papers arguing that the meaning of any law must remain tethered to its history and its framers’ original intent.
But with only three years on the bench, Barrett’s judicial record is limited. She has forcefully endorsed a Second Amendment guarantee of an individual right to own guns, and wrote a scathing decision defending male students’ rights to due process in campus sex-assault tribunals.
She has also applied a by-the-book interpretation of immigration law — including a case siding with the Trump administration’s effort to restrict welfare benefits for non-citizens.
While Barrett on Monday was endorsed by the Susan B. Anthony List, a top anti-abortion advocacy group, she has been careful not to condemn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that made abortion a constitutional right.
“She clearly testified that she will set aside her personal beliefs and follow the law,” said Mike Davis, president of the conservative Article III Project. “And her three years on the 7th circuit have made crystal clear that that is what she has done.”
But in scholarly papers, Barrett has explored the idea that past Supreme Court cases may be overturned, despite the precedents they have set, if the cases were “wrongly decided.” One such case, she noted, was Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), an important abortion decision that upheld and modified Roe.
An outright overturn of Roe will likely remain a bridge too far, even for a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives, experts say.
“I don’t think the conservative justices have the stomachs or the intellectual inclination for such a radical move,” said prominent First Amendment attorney Ron Coleman. “What I do think, however, is that they’ll begin the process of trimming back what has become an absolutist, unconditional right to abortion under all circumstances.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it a personal crusade to confirm as many Trump-nominated federal judges as possible, to the Democrats’ chagrin.
The Senate has installed 218 of Trump’s nominees in federal court seats — more than any first-term president since 1980, and more that a quarter of all active judges on the bench.
The fast-track plan to confirm Barrett ahead of the Nov. 3 election comes despite opposition by two GOP senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, but no one else has broken ranks.
A Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination could begin as soon as Oct. 12, and a confirmation vote in the Senate — where Republicans have a 53-47 majority — could be held Oct. 29.
Democrats have been crying foul because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) refused to let lawmakers consider then-President Barack Obama’s SCOTUS nomination of District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland following the death of death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, on grounds it was an election year.
But the Dems have few tools to derail McConnell’s plan to immediately fill Ginsburg’s seat. With a 53-seat Senate majority and almost all of his caucus in lockstep behind him, McConnell has no incentive to wait.
“There’s no question about the right to do it,” said Coleman. “I worry about the threat to the integrity of the Constitutional process posed by the cynical campaign to convince the public otherwise.”
But the political fallout could be widespread — and unpredictable.
A third of the Senate is up for re-election in just 38 days, including eight members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Contentious confirmation hearings could help vulnerable Republican Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) burnish their records — or could drive opposition turnout in their closely divided states.
None of the three Judiciary Committee Democrats up for re-election are at any risk of losing. But those with showboat tendencies, like Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), will undoubtedly make the most of the spotlight.
Meanwhile, the hearings will provide an unexpected stage for the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, who is also a Judiciary Committee member.
“Mitch McConnell is giving Kamala Harris free airtime to rally the base,” said a Democratic Senate insider. “You are just giving the veep nominee a platform to roast a conservative justice.”
But if Harris appears to attack the nominee based on her religious convictions — even as her running mate, Joe Biden, woos Catholic voters in Florida and the Rust Belt — the opportunity could backfire.
“If Democrats want to pursue their unconstitutional religious test and anti-Catholic bigotry, it will turn out very badly for them on November 3,” Davis said.