The NPR Politics Podcast - Amy Coney Barrett Nominated And Expected To Be Confirmed To Supreme Court

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

The former Antonin Scalia clerk currently serves on the federal bench after a fifteen-year stint as a law professor at Notre Dame. The Senate will now consider her nomination, where Republicans appear to have the votes to ensure a swift confirmation.This episode: campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Carrie Johnson, National Justice Correspondent. It's 6.20 Eastern on Saturday, September 26th. And about an hour ago, in the White House Rose Garden, President Trump nominated Judge

Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. She is a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials, and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution, Judge Amy Coney Barrett. We're going to spend the rest of the podcast talking about Judge Barrett, but Carrie, let's just start out with this. Three nominations to the Supreme Court is not something that George Bush got. It's not something

that Bill Clinton got. It's something Barack Obama got but was not able to follow through on for reasons we will obviously discuss later. What the president has a chance to do here is extremely rare. This is an enormous opportunity for President Trump and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to cement a conservative legacy on the court for the next generation to come. Worth pointing out, Scott, I've spent some of the last three years chronicling this campaign to fill court vacancies. The president and Mitch McConnell have filled over 200 lifetime tenure federal judgeships. And if they're successful here, they'll get a third Supreme Court pick too. Yeah. And even if President Trump loses the election in November, that's something that will reverberate for decades to come. Kelsey, judges, they're known in legal communities,

they're known in small political circles, but really the nomination at the White House is that moment to introduce yourself to the country. What did Judge Barrett say about her judicial philosophy? What did she say about her background? What stood out to you? I thought it was really interesting that she started her remarks by acknowledging the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And she said that she talked about the closer relationship

that Ginsburg had with her own mentor, Antonin Scalia. She acknowledged that she would be looking back to the person she was replacing. The flag of the United States is still flying at half-staff in memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to mark the end of a great American life. Justice Ginsburg began her career at a time when women were not welcome in the legal profession. But she not only broke glass ceilings, she smashed them. But she said that her mentor, Antonin Scalia, his judicial philosophy was hers as well. And I also thought it was really interesting that she specifically said that a judge must apply the law as written. She went

out of her way to say that judges are not policymakers. A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold. Now, I think that that is something that you'll be hearing Republicans repeating over and over in the coming days as they talk about her qualifications and they talk about how well suited she is for this position. And it is something that Democrats will attempt to call into question as they ask questions in the Judiciary Committee hearings that we expect to be coming quite quickly now. Carrie, can you walk us through Judge Barrett's background, what we need to know about her as a person, as a judge? Yeah, she started out as a clerk to two very conservative judges, Lawrence Silberman here on the D.C. Federal Appeals Court, and then, as Kelsey mentioned, Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

She served as a law professor at Notre Dame in a very popular one for about 15 years. And then about three years ago, President Trump nominated her to a lifetime tenured seat on the Federal Appeals Court for the Seventh Circuit based in Chicago. Since then, she's written about 100 opinions altogether, kind of a lot, Scott, and enough to give us a flavor of her record on some abortion rights issues and some gun cases too. Judge Barrett is 48, pretty young, would be the youngest justice. And she's married to a former federal prosecutor, has seven children, including two adopted from Haiti. Let's talk about her track record and her public statements on a couple of key issues. Supreme Court, but the shift from Justice Kennedy to Justice Kavanaugh really moved the court to the right on this issue. And a shift from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Judge Coney Barrett would be

an even more enormous shift. What do we know about Judge Barrett's record on this? You know, dating back to her time as an academic at Notre Dame, Judge Barrett signed statements or gave comments to Notre Dame publications saying that she believed that life begins at conception. We know she's a devout Catholic, and certainly Democrats are going to be asking questions about how her faith influences her jurisprudence in this area. But even more so, there are about three decisions related to abortion and abortion rights that she's handled on the federal appeals court. Two of them, Scott, she would have made it harder in some cases for women to get abortions or upheld state regulations in Indiana that would have prohibited abortions based on the sex or a disability. We do know also, of course, that one of Judge Barrett's children,

her youngest, has Down syndrome. Let's talk about the other big issue out there, the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court will hear yet another case on the ACA just days after the presidential election. And Joe Biden has made it clear he's going to focus his public statements, his remarks on the campaign trail, on the Affordable Care Act. It's increasingly popular. It's something people don't want to go away. He feels like that's a winning issue to focus public attention on during this upcoming confirmation fight. What do we know about how she stands there? You know, when she was at Notre Dame, she wrote an article basically being very critical of Chief Justice John Roberts, who, of course, helped save Obamacare last time around by ruling that the penalty was a tax,

which was his kind of creative way of saving the law. Barrett was highly critical of Roberts there. Of course, the issue coming before the court the week after the election is a little bit different, but Democrats are certainly worried about what she might do with the Obamacare law. to be given control of the White House, the House and the Senate in order to ensure the safety of the Affordable Care Act. And you can expect that that will be a big part of the message in the coming weeks as they try to hone this as both an issue before the existing Senate and a potential issue for the Congresses to come. And we're going to talk about that battle after a quick break about what's going to happen in the Senate and also out in the campaign world. But I think, you know, just to underscore this, as we end the first part, looking at the court itself, to keep things like the ACA in place if we just assume that people vote based how they have before. I mean, six to three just makes an enormous difference on so many issues. It's as although people who have followed the court for

a long time say we have had examples of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's earlier Supreme Court picks, siding with the liberals sometimes in some cases. So nothing is ever entirely clear, but it certainly is going to make things much harder for the liberal wing to prevail. And it's certainly going to be enormously different than when RBG was on the bench. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, that confirmation battle. Radio Ambulante is NPR's only Spanish-language podcast. Listen for stories you won't hear anywhere else, told by the voices that make Latin America come alive. Each week, we bring you another remarkable story that will surprise and move you. Radio Ambulante. New episodes every Tuesday. Listen and subscribe. And we're back, and I just want to start this segment by listening to something that President Trump said

toward the end of the announcement with Judge Barrett. This should be a straightforward and prompt confirmation. Should be very easy. Good luck. It's going to be very quick. I'm sure it'll be extremely non-controversial. We said that the last time, didn't we? I think we can. There was some laughter. Probably disagree with the president here. I mean, starting with the fact that about 800,000 people have already cast their presidential ballots and the election, so it would be record-breaking speed to move Amy Coney Barrett through the process. But that doesn't mean it's impossible, and I would anticipate that Republicans are going to do just about everything in their power to make sure that it does happen. It will be complicated in order to get all of the review done, but we know that there are limitations on what the president is going to expect of the investigations. We are anticipating a speedy process through the typical meetings with

folks on Capitol Hill. And Republicans say that they are starting the first hearing on October 12th. Boy, that's not a long time for the FBI background check investigation or for the American Bar Association to do its investigation either. Well, yeah. And one of the things that Republicans were saying in the lead up to this kind of their pre-buttle to all of these questions about the speed was they've been telling reporters on background that, you know, they've already vetted her. And when she came up for a vote in 2017 for her current position. So they say that a lot of the information about her is known and known to senators and her record is known to senators. I want to talk about something that

we're hearing from a lot of Senate Republicans already, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, many others, they are speaking out against what they say are attacks on Judge Amy Coney Barrett's Catholic faith. They say that that is a reason that people are opposing her. What are they talking about? How much of a factor is this? So they are talking about questions that Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked of Amy Coney Barrett when she was up for her current position in 2017. During that process, she talked about dogma, and she questioned how Coney Barrett's faith would play into the decision she makes as a judge. Now, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the Senate in general have not been talking about her faith. This is something that Republicans are talking about,

and in part because it is a convenient way to set up a tension and to try to force that tension to happen. They would like to have Democrats focus on that because then they can elevate a perception that Democrats are being unfair or that they are repeating patterns that many conservatives found very offensive in the Kavanaugh process. And they're trying to set up similar political dynamics. Democrats are doing their very best to avoid that happening. So, Kelsey, what are Democrats on the Judiciary Committee in the Senate saying? Democrats are focusing a lot on the process and what they say is unfair and hypocritical of Republicans and how they are handling a nomination this close to the election. They go back to the way Majority Leader Mitch McConnell handled President Obama's

nomination of Merrick Garland, and when he said that he wouldn't consider him so close to an election. Now, the question that I think is going to come up now is how effective is that argument? How much do people really care about process? And how much do they care about the other side that Democrats are talking about, which is protecting the Affordable Care Act and making the argument that the unfairness that they see in the Senate is actually about long-term problems with the Senate.

And it's an argument for voters to go out and reject Republicans running for reelection and deliver Democrats a Senate majority. Now, that might be a long leap, but they think that they have done a lot of the groundwork to energize Democrats around the question of the courts after the Kavanaugh nomination. And this will be a real test of whether or not they were able to turn that energy and frustration and anger about the Kavanaugh process into something actionable in this election. And speaking of now Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Democrats, Scott, any word from

Kamala Harris about her reaction to the Barrett pick? Yeah, she put out a statement moments after the pick was formally announced saying that she strongly opposes Judge Barrett's nomination. And as we expected, because this is what the Biden campaign has been saying over and over again, Senator Harris focused most of her statement on the Affordable Care Act, saying that she thinks it's in danger, that this would be another vote to blow it up, to overthrow it. And she is going to oppose this nomination. Obviously not a surprise to anybody who listens to this podcast. And as we've mentioned before, I think one key question is how Senator Harris approaches this high profile nomination hearing when she is trying to be

elected nationwide at the exact same time. So as all of us know, this upcoming confirmation hearing is going to have a lot of twists and turns. It's going to be a long thing to cover. There's going to be a lot of things that come up that we don't expect to happen at all. So I think on this Saturday evening, we should end this conversation here and just get ready to have a lot more conversations about this in the next few weeks. I look forward to talking to you guys regularly. That's a deal. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Kelsey Snell. I look forward to talking to you guys regularly. That's a deal. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Carrie Johnson,

national justice correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.