Donald Trump is set to announce his nomination for the Supreme Court today, and that nominee is federal appellate judge and Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett. The 48 year old mother of seven would be the youngest justice on the bench and the court’s fifth female justice ever. Coney Barrett’s quickie nomination, only 8 days after the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is part of the republican’s race to confirm the next justice with merely 37 days to go until the election.
Barrett’s record is, predictably, strongly anti-abortion and anti-Obamacare. As a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, Barrett shares most of his conservative viewpoints. She is also a devout Catholic and a member of fringe Christian group called People of Praise. The group requires its members to swear a lifelong covenant to the group, and are assigned personal advisors called “heads” for men and “handmaids” for women. The group also considers husbands as the heads of authority within their families.
Barrett’s religious affiliation came up in her confirmation hearing for her nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein questioned her, asking “Why is it that so many of us on this side have this very uncomfortable feeling that dogma and law are two different things,” adding that, “And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”
But despite the familiarity of the language, People of Praise was NOT the inspiration behind Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. That would be the People of Hope, a fundamentalist group operating out of New Jersey.
However, Barrett’s faith is still cause for concern. She has called abortion “always immoral”, and during her tenure on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, she has ruled in favor of restricting abortion access in two cases.
Barret is also anti-LGBTQ+ rights, openly siding with dissenters in the marriage equality case of Obergefell v. Hodges. She also said she believes that Title IX protections should not extend to transgender people.
Should Barrett’s confirmation be forced through, the balance of the court would shift to 6-3 in favor of conservatives. Even the defection of Chief Justice John Roberts would not alone be enough to sway the court in future rulings. And if Barrett is confirmed before the presidential election results are in, she could very well be ruling on the presidency itself.
And while senate democrats have strongly spoken out against her, they have little in the way of actual power. Republicans have the majority and they have the votes. And while Sens. Murkowski and Collins have said they wouldn’t vote in favor of a nominee this close to an election, no other republican senators have made the same promise.
And so it goes that Donald Trump, the worst, most corrupt president in American history, will have placed three Supreme Court justices on the bench.
(via CNN, featured image: screencap/TODAY)
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