The Daily Signal - What to Expect Ahead of Amy Coney Barrett’s Confirmation Vote Next Week

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Senate Republicans are looking to confirm Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett next week, likely on Monday.  The Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to vote on the nomination of Barrett, currently a judge on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, on Thursday. What were some of the most outrageous—and best parts—of her Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings? What do we expect as the Senate votes to confirm her? Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, joins The Daily Signal podcast to discuss it all. We also cover these stories: A tie vote in the Supreme Court over the deadline for Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots means that mail-in votes will be counted in the state through Nov. 6.    A poll released Tuesday from Gallup found that 51% of those surveyed want Barrett confirmed.  On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, October 21st. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. As the Senate prepares to confirm Amy Coney-Barrant next week, what lies ahead for the judge and mother of seven? What were some of the most outrageous and best parts of her Senate confirmation hearings? Carrie Safferino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, joins me today on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. A tie vote in the Supreme Court over the deadline for Pennsylvania's mail-in ballots means that mail-in votes will still be counted in the state through November 6th. The Supreme Court voted four to four Monday on whether or not Pennsylvania

ballots arriving by mail in the three days after the election should be counted or not. Since the vote was a tie in the High Court, the decision defaulted back to the ruling made by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, which did rule in favor of the deadline extension. Any ballot mail before the end of scheduled voting on November 3rd and delivered on or before November 6 will be counted in Pennsylvania. All poll released Tuesday from Gallup found that 51% of voters want Judge Amy Barrett confirmed. The poll taken from September 30th through October 15th, which should be able to, started four days after President Trump nominated Barrett was the 12 Supreme Court nominee for whom Gallup has measured support among the public since 1987, also found that support for Barrett's confirmation

is higher than either of Trump's two previous nominees. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh had at any point in time prior to their confirmations, per the Hill. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The suit has been filed to stop. Google from unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anti-competitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets, according to a statement by the DOJ. Eleven different state attorneys general also signed the suit. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas are all standing with the Department of Justice and accusing Google

of holding illegal monopolies for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising. Google responded to the lawsuit on Tuesday, tweeting today's lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply flawed. People use Google because they choose to, not because they're forced to, or because they can't find alternatives. Senate Republicans are looking to confirm Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney-Barrant next week, likely on Monday. The Senate Judiciary, Committee is poised to vote on Judge Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation on Thursday, according to Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsay Graham of South Carolina. Of the upcoming full Senate vote expected Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the

Senate floor, I look forward to the Judiciary Committee's vote on Thursday. The full Senate will turn to Judge Barrett's nomination as soon as it comes out of committee. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi told Bloomberg television on Tuesday that she is optimistic about a stimulus package being passed soon. Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin have been working to find a deal that will satisfy both parties and provide the American people with the help they need. Pelosi said that Monday and Tuesday were focused on negotiating the language of the bill, which she told Bloomberg they have begun to write. It might not be finished

by Election Day. We need our legislation all written by the end of this week, Pelosi said. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the Senate will consider the bill if Pelosi and the Treasury Secretary reach an agreement, but he has not guaranteed a vote on the stimulus package. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Carrie Severino looking back on Amy Barrett's confirmation hearings and what to expect as the Senate prepares to vote next week. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear some of the biggest names in American politics speak? Every day, the Heritage Foundation hosts webinars called Heritage Events Live. Webinar topics range from ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic to the CARES Act and the economy. These webinars are free and open to the public.

To find the latest webinars and register, visit heritage.org slash events. We're joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Carrie Civerino. She is the president of the Judicial Crisis Network. Carrie, it's great to have you back with us on the Daily Signal podcast. Great to be here. Well, last week, as most of the nation watched, Judge Yme Barrett, faced three days of intense questioning. In some cases, the questions were a little bit condescending. And I'd like to talk to you a little bit about your perspective of those three days of questioning. Yeah, it was really impressive. I mean, my whole career, I've been watching Supreme Court confirmations and judicial confirmations generally. I don't know if I've ever seen one that was just as clear a knock-it-out-the-park performance. as Amy Coney Barrett delivered last week. She was poised. She was very patient and boy, I was exhausted

by the end of that first day of 11 hours or so questioning. And when you keep on getting asked the same question over and over and over again, and especially when it's questions you know you can't answer about how are you going to rule in a specific case or something. And yet she just kept coming back. And at the end of the day, even she had some complicated questions

that were thrown under some of them even by Republican senators. I'm like, oh my gosh, guys, give her a break. And yet she's still on. And she was really able to answer all of these and be up on all these different areas of law. And I loved the moment where she held up her notepad and it was blank. And you saw, oh, my gosh, she's doing this all without notes. It was very powerful. On the note of the questions, I was wondering if there were any particular questions she received or some of the statements,

because sometimes she was just spread like a very long pages and pages of statement. So if there's anything of those that stood out to you of, wow, like this was an appropriate or that was a really good question. if there's any that really, you know, made you think that was noteworthy for one reason or another. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I thought was the kind of inappropriate was the focus of the questions from the Democrats on her policy positions. And they did this most notably with respect to Obamacare. And for anyone who watched the hearing you saw, they would often take turns having posters behind them of a picture of someone, one of their constituents or something who had been helped by the Affordable Care Act. And constantly the implication,

route is, well, you don't care about these people because we know that you're committed to ruling against the Affordable Care Act, which is, as she, I think, did a good job of explaining later on in the day is a fallacy on multiple levels. First of all, she's like, I don't have any animus toward the Affordable Care Act. There's no, like, I think this is a horrible thing, and I'm going to do everything in my power to get rid of it. And second of all, she had written at one point about the NFIB versus Sebelius decision that was the original Obamacare case that had to do with it, whether it's a tax or a penalty, that case. And she criticized Chief Justice Roberts because he chose an interpretation of the statute that even he acknowledged wasn't a natural

interpretation of the statute. And she said, well, even if I have said that, the question that the court is addressing this term, because they do have a case coming about Obamacare, it's a different question. So unless you're trying to say, well, I, on a totally different question, I'm going to rule against it just because I hate Obamacare, then your arguments don't make sense. sense. And they did that on a few different areas as well. They were asking her how she felt about global warming and how she, all of these different topics. And you're going, well, that's, you know, this isn't, if you're, you're suggesting then that when she talks about her approach to the law, looking what the text of the law says, looking at what the original meaning of the Constitution is,

that she's really just lying, that really what she's doing is trying to figure out what her policy is and then affecting that from the bench. But that's really insulting to call her a liar in that prospect. And it's also belied by her own record, which is, very clear that she has calls it like she sees it. She says, she looks at what the law says, and this is why she has cases where, for example, she's ruled for and against the Trump administration, even though he nominated her, because that's what you do as a judge. You try to look what the actual answers are. I thought one of my favorite parts of it were some of the moments of her personality coming through and getting a chance to talk about her family. There was one gotcha

moment that I thought was really powerful. One of the senators, I think it was Senator Durbin, I can't remember from the other side was saying, asked her what she thought about the George Floyd videos. And it seemed to get another of these kind of, that's not really relevant to what your job as a judge is, but okay, you know, she answered the question. And it was so, it was actually brought me to tears here talking about watching this video with her daughter who is black. And her husband and her and her sons were on a camping trip and how they cried together, how it has been a conversation that has been going on through their house since then. and how trying to talk through what's going on, and especially with her daughter who realizes that, you know, looking at that man could see potentially her own father,

her own son, her own, you know, a man who looks like her in this same situation. So I think that was really, I think intended as maybe a gotcha question, but came off and showed her humanity in a real way, as well as the opportunity she had to respond to some of the criticism that she'd had. where she talked about how, you know, attacks, for example, on her children's adoptions and how hurtful that was, but how that was one of the things that when she and her husband prayed about whether to take this opportunity and accept the nomination, that they recognized that there could be some of that. And unfortunately, it could be people attacking her children or trying to

hurt her personally. But that's challenge and the potential difficulty of the nomination. It wasn't a reason to say no when you had a job that's going to be difficult for whoever is put up for this position and how we should step up for public service when asked, even in the face of difficulty. And we know that she has faced some of that difficulty in the process. Well, thank you for sharing that. Actually, one of my next questions was going to be about health care and all the Obamacare questions she received.

And I wanted to hear from you. So many of the senators basically phrased it as if you were not confirmed, people will basically die. And that's, I mean, I'm paraphrasing here, where that's a lot of what we heard over and over again. So I just wanted to ask you as someone who has followed this process and knows the procedure, is that appropriate when having these conversations? I think it's inappropriate because again, they're not being honest about what her own positions even are. It's not as even as if she's taken a position on the case that is addressing Obamacare. On top of which, as some of the

Republican senators pointed out, Senator Chairman Graham, for example, the idea. that overturning Obamacare and then people will die and you want people to die is an absurd thing in of itself. I mean, obviously there was health care before Obamacare. There will be health care, even if that law were changed or eliminated. But the idea that people are taking a position of her, even a caricatured position of hers, and then blowing it to the most rhetorically, you know, out there statement. Unfortunately, that's not something that's new. I mean, I think the most memorable opportunity with that the Democrats did that was with, Judge Bork. And that was something that happened and really took a lot of people by surprise at the time, because that was not a common tactic at the time, but they went down, and Senator Kennedy at the time, went down a list of all of these issues. And they said, well, if Bork is confirmed, there's going to be, you know, segregated lunch counters and women are going to be getting back alley abortions. And policemen will be allowed to break into your house and drag you out in the middle of the night. And it simply

wasn't true. And it was, and it was all more hyperbole than anything else. But unfortunately, a lot of that seemed to be very effective in caricaturing him at the time and contributed to his defeat. And I think now a lot of people are recognized that, oh, this isn't actually, you know, this is, this is all about politics, their statement. It really doesn't reflect what the actual nominees' positions are, what her positions were as a judge. And so I think that has been a little bit of the boy crying wolf here where they, They keep on, every time there's a Republican nominee, there's some excuse to say, people are going to die, people are going to die.

And you're like, guys, you say this every time. We have to recognize this is not actually a reasonable statement based on her record. Well, two other instances I wanted to ask you about. On one note, Senator Amy Klobuchar had told Barrett during her exchange with her one of the days of the hearing, she said, I might have thought someday I'd be sitting in that chair. It was kind of an interesting exchange that they had. And then Senator Masey, Heron, a Democrat from Hawaii, had asked Judge Barrett if she ever sexually assaulted someone. And so as someone who is a mom, your mom, you work in the law as well.

What was your perspective of those two different exchanges, given that you do have a similar life pattern to Judge Barrett? Yeah, I too caught that like, side note, Senator Klobuchar. It's like, oh, someone's a little better that she didn't make the Supreme Court list. Although who knows? I mean, maybe she'll be on Biden's list, although I think he's at this point committed to, even though we won't tell us who's in this list, he's committed to putting a woman of color on somehow. So maybe she's still bitter she's not making the list. I don't know. Senator Heronos question was, I felt like, you know, look, she has this pattern of asking that question of every nominee. She asked it of Gorset. She asked of Kavanaugh. But I think it's a really crude question. And it was particularly troubling to me because her charge. were in the room at the time she asked that question. I mean, this is not something you want, and have to explain to your kids of what's going on here. And my kids were watching much of these

hearings. I thought it was a great opportunity to have a civic education moment for them. But we shouldn't have to censor those moments for our children. And I do think it also, you know, it's pretty crude to effectively suggest that maybe she had been out there sexually assaulting people, obviously not the case. And I think, She was very unambiguous, but I don't think anyone really took seriously the idea that she's a sexual assailant. But unfortunately, you know, making those kind of illusions is nothing new in the digital confirmation process. Well, Carrie, you did a lot of work covering and speaking about now Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings. We all remember what went down then.

And I was curious to hear your thoughts on how Judge Barrett's confirmation process has made even similar but also very different. from Justice Kavanaugh and just your thoughts comparing the two. Yeah. Well, I think one of the reasons that it has been relatively, I mean, there's certainly been a lot of hostility, but that we haven't seen some of the explosions that we did during the Kavanaugh process is because some people, even the left,

have recognized how much that hurt them, and particularly this close to an election, I think there are a lot of people who realized if they go for the jugular, effectively like they did with Kavanaugh, that that's something that Americans don't want to see. We don't want to have this turned into a partisan football and a smear campaign every time.

I think it made it harder for them to do it because it was someone like Amy Kony Barrett. Obviously, a woman is harder to make allegations against as they did against Kavanaugh and Justice Thomas, recall. So that wasn't a new strategy either. But I think it was also something where they had to recognize that some of the attacks that they had tried on her in the past, the anti-Catholic attacks that Senator Feinstein and

Senator Durbin launched at her last hearing, for example, and that Senator Harris is famous for using against other nominees. That's the kind of thing that is going to look really bad. And at a moment where it's so close to an election, I think that may have forced them to pull back a little. At the same time, I was surprised to see that some people on the left are even trying to say that Senator Feinstein should be taken out of her position of leadership in the committee because she was too nice, which I think, gosh, guys, I think, she's helping you. I think I think the fact that she was cordial and civil during this process and that she's able to work with Chairman Graham on that committee should have been something that people

should be celebrating and not view as somehow evidence of her mental decline, which is what they seem to be citing. Oh, you hugged Senator Graham. That must mean that you just don't have, you don't have what it takes anymore. And I think actually the extent to which, even though there were crazy questions and there have been from a lot of the, particularly from the media, some really gross and rude attacks on her faith and her family. The fact that Democrats didn't want to go there in public while they were on C-SPAN while they were in the hearings is a testament to the fact that they saw how harmful the Kavanaugh confirmation was to the nation. I have to say, though, I'm saying this almost with, you know, my fingers crossed here because at this point, we are the phase in this

nomination that we were in the Kavanaugh nomination when those allegations exploded. So Kavanaugh as well, there was a lot of hostility in opposition during his first hearing, but people afterwards recognized he had done an outstanding job. He had knocked out of the park. He was going to get confirmed. And that's when, out of a desperation move, some of these smear campaigns were launched. And so I think we can't count our chickens quite yet, and we have to just hold on. Obviously, we've got scheduled a vote on the floor coming up and, or first in the committee

and then the floor. So things are moving along, but I don't think we can ever be sure that there's not this last ditch effort that's going to be launched until she's actually confirmed and over the finish line. Well, as you mentioned, the Senate Judiciary Committee will be voting on Thursday, and then the full Senate vote is expected next week, probably on Monday. What do you expect? And do you think by midweek next week, we could have a Justice Amy Barrett? Yeah, again, barring something crazy happening, which is not, you know, not unforeseen and not something that hasn't happened before, but assuming everything goes according to plan, I think

we should have an Amy Coney-A-Baird. I think we absolutely have the votes, as even some liberals have acknowledged, you know, if this were any other year, she would be overwhelmingly confirmed. And I think not just that. I think she would have been unanimously confirmed under different political circumstances. I think she's probably going to get by with a bare partisan majority. you know, maybe you'll get people like Joe Manchin, who's okay being the 52nd vote in these cases, but not really the 51st. But I think that's unfortunate because there used to be an error. You know, Justice Scalia was confirmed unanimously. Justice O'Connor was confirmed unanimously. Justice Ginsburg was confirmed virtually unanimously, despite having a very clear record of working for the ACLU,

having some opinions were well to the left, you know, even at the time. And that's, I think when we are confronted with a nominee who's qualified as Judge Barrett is, I think she ought to be getting a unanimous support. But, you know, I think I think she'll certainly have enough to be seated. And I think it'll be really exciting to have the first originalist woman sitting on the court. Well, as we wrap up, I want to do your perspective on what has happened in 2020 with so many lower court judges continuing to be confirmed and how the Trump administration has worked on that to confirm those judges. What will be the impact there in the long? long term. Well, in some sense, we're already seeing it with Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court. She was one of those

lower court judges, one of those 50-some appellate judges that this president has had confirmed in really, really historic numbers to have that many in a single term is outstanding. What that does to the courts is it takes the appellate courts where 99% of the cases are decided and helps bring them back in line with the rule of law. These aren't judges who are just going to switch the courts from being run by liberal judicial acts. to conservative judicial activists. These are judges who believe in following the rule of law as it is written. I remember speaking to one Trump appointee last year who said, it's a wonderful job, but the most frustrating part is there's so many laws that are just really bad laws, either bad laws because you disagree with them or bad laws because they were just, you know, the sausage is not, is not always in a pretty product when the, when the Congress gets writing a law, they don't do it, they don't do it well. They make mistakes or they need to be, they need to be updated. But you have to still decide cases according to those laws. And that means sometimes should come to results that

you really don't like and you don't think are the results you would like to do. And that, while it can be frustrating for a judge, is the exact answer you want to hear. Those are the kind of judges you're going to have on the courts. They're going to be faithful to the rule of law. That means that when we find laws that we don't like, we actually, as the American people, have recourse to, can have recourse to our elected officials. You can't do anything about a judge that's misinterpreting the law. But you can do something if the laws are badly written and you can change them through your elected representatives as the Constitution describes. And then, of course, all of these men and women who are on the courts now, who have had already an impact in switching

three circuits to be majority Republican appointees, to have switched the Ninth Circuit, which is widely known as being one of the most frequently overturned, most detached from anything that has to do with, you know, the text of what the law is very activist court. Now is very close to 50-50 judges, Republican and Democrat appointees. And now, even though those Republican appointees who weren't all originalists or textualists before are much more dominated by some people who are going to be faithful to the words of the law. I think that's a huge win, not just for Republicans, not just for conservatives, but really for the nation as a whole. And these, of course, the men and women who are going to be then future Supreme Court justices one day that they're getting their experience

and they're honing their judicial skills now, hopefully to move on to even higher office. Well, Carrie, thank you so much for joining us today on the Daily Signal Podcast. It's always great having you. Good to be here. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.