The NPR Politics Podcast - Who Are The Women Under Consideration To Replace RBG?

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

"Most of them [the potential nominees] are young, and they've gone through the [nomination] process very recently," Trump said. He noted that one person he is considering for the vacancy is 38 years old and could be on the court for 50 years. Stay Up To Date: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Live BlogThis episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, 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

Hi, I'm Elise from Warren, Michigan, and today is my 26th birthday. Hi, I'm Elise's mom, Sue Ann, and tomorrow is my 60th birthday. Hi, I'm Sue Ann's mom, Mary Louise, and the day after tomorrow is my 95th birthday. This podcast was recorded at... Oh, wow. This timestamp just gets cooler and cooler and cooler. It's like folded in on itself. This is amazing. Three generations of women. How apt for today. So this podcast was recorded at 2.06 p.m. on Monday, the 21st of September. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll still be celebrating

our birthdays three days in a row every September. Okay, here's the show. Happy birthday to us. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Carrie Johnson, national justice correspondent. And the Supreme Court has announced that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will lie in repose in the court on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. Friday, she will lie in state in the Capitol building. President Trump says he plans to announce his nominee to fill the vacancy later this week. I think it'll be on Friday or Saturday. That was President Trump on Fox & Friends this morning. He says he has his selection list down to five options. We will talk about some of them in the second half of the podcast. But first,

the fight. The fight has already begun. And even before the president sends it over to the Senate, we are talking about Republicans are going to meet on Tuesday where Mitch McConnell is basically going to make his case for why they should do this now. Already, we've seen some senators not keeping their powder dry. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have already come out and said they do not support moving forward with this process before the election. But frankly, the early indications are that Republicans are sticking with Mitch McConnell here. He knows his conference. He knows the stakes. He's done this before. And if he has 50 votes, every indication is that they intend to fill this seat before the election. That is a fast timeline. I mean, just an indication of how fast the timeline is. This discussion,

this heated discussion is already happening. The president is planning to make this announcement. And we know that that Ginsburg won't be buried at Arlington Cemetery until next Tuesday. So a week from tomorrow, it's likely that we will know who the nominee is before then. Can we talk about what the rush is? Well, I think the rush is the election, right? I mean, there's a lot of calculations happening here. But obviously, you know, President Trump's the underdog in this election right now. The Senate Republican majority is at stake in this election, too. And I think Mitch McConnell, you know, known for the long game, that's sort of what he prides himself on, is seeing around these corners, sees a reality

very soon in which his ability to continue to fill judicial vacancies could go away very fast. Mitch McConnell looks at the judiciary as his legacy. He has spent, this is beyond the Supreme Court, right? And Kerry knows this as good as anybody, that he has spent this entire Congress, this past two years, filling hundreds of vacancies. He's trying to remake the federal judiciary. And I think the option, the prize of potentially shifting the ideological balance of the Supreme Court as sort of a potential final act in that effort is something he's just simply not going to walk away from. It is a pretty clear example of sort of brass knuckle partisan politics. But that is what Mitch

McConnell's been known for. And I think anyone who followed what happened with Merrick Garland and how far he's gone to get conservatives on the court should not be surprised at this timeline or what he's trying to do. But man, oh man, this is a tight timeline. I think the Congressional Research Service says on average, it takes like 69 days from nomination to confirmation. We don't have 69 days till the election, especially if President Trump doesn't move until late this week or this weekend. This is going to be a race, Sue. It is. But I also think that's why you see and I know we're going to talk more about this, but you see like a lot of the names that are sort of circling in on are people that have

already been vetted, people that have already been approved by the Senate, people that senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have already supported for the bench. So assuming that the president doesn't make some kind of risky radical pick or a pick that somehow blows up in controversy, Republicans really want to fill this seat and they have the rules and they have the power to get it done. Sue, sometimes the Senate comes down to simple math. What do Republicans need? What do Democrats need in order to delay or get a rejection of Trump's nominee? What are the numbers? The question is, are there four Republican senators who don't support Mitch McConnell's strategy here? Collins and Murkowski have already come out as two no's for the process. They don't want to move forward right now, although I think we should note that doesn't mean they would necessarily be no's on a nominee. Are two other Republican senators going to block this process? That's the question we don't know the definitive answer to yet. We're waiting to hear from senators like Mitt Romney of Utah, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, senators who previously had

said they didn't support the idea of moving forward with a Supreme Court nomination in this exact scenario. So yes, it is raising all sorts of questions about hypocrisy, about political power grabs. But the fact that Mitch McConnell has still been able to hold the line through a very contentious weekend, and certainly likely through when whoever President Trump names as the nominee is advantage McConnell. And I just think there's a lot of unwillingness to break with the party on issues as high profile as a Supreme Court nominee. Okay, let me ask a political gaming it out type question, which is in 2016, there was this vacant seat that Republicans widely believe. I think everybody widely believes having that vacancy on the line helped President Trump because there was there was something on the line that that that conservatives wanted and that they could only get that evangelical Christians that they could only

get if they elected President Trump, which is to fill this seat with a conservative, the Scalia seat. So now we are headed into an election. They could run the same play and say, hey, this seat is on the line, you need to reelect me. But if they've already done it, then it's just like, well, aren't you happy with me? Which seems like a less motivating emotion. That's true. Although I think that, you know, the courts have always been, and certainly in modern elections, incredibly mobilizing for the conservative base. What's different now is I think it's equally, and maybe even by greater measure, mobilizing for the Democratic left base now. I think that they recognize that this is equally

mobilizing. And again, Democrats are favored to win a lot of these races. So I just don't think that Mitch McConnell is someone who hedges his bets when it comes to elections. And I think, you know, he knows his majority is at risk, but you could argue that maybe the majority is worth risking for something as big a prize as putting a conservative on the bench to fill the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which has sort of been an ideological dream for so many in the conservative movement for so long. OK, well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we are going to pick Carrie's brain on who the pick could be. This message comes from NPR sponsor Showtime presenting The Comey Rule, a two-night event series looking into the aftermath of the relationship between James Comey and Donald Trump and the 2016 election. The series provides a new perspective on real-life events including the hacking of the DNC, Russian interference, and Hillary Clinton's emails. Emmy winners Jeff

Daniels, Holly Hunter, and Brendan Gleeson star in The Comey Rule, September 27th and 28th, only on Showtime. On Facebook, there are these three brothers who love guns, say guns are over-regulated, say the NRA is too quick to compromise. And they're gaining more followers every day. They're very in-your-face and offensive, and by God, I love them for it. Listen now to the No Compromise podcast from NPR. And we are back. And all three of us spent a lot of our weekend calling and texting people we know who are connected or semi-connected to this process and the decision that the president is making. And we've gotten a few insights into who President Trump might nominate. So, Carrie, let's go through that list.

Yeah, sure. We're talking about five women here, starting with Amy Coney Barrett. She is currently on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And she is a former law professor at Notre Dame. She is also a former Supreme Court clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, who President Trump has said in the past is his favorite Supreme Court justice. And Barrett has a real record of speaking out both in the academy and now in her years on the federal court bench on topics like abortion. She told a magazine at Notre Dame several years back that she believes in the value of life from conception to natural death that certainly would inform her views on the landmark president Roe v. Wade.

And since she's been on the bench, she's had a couple of rulings that relate to abortion based on Indiana laws, one involving parental consent for minors seeking abortions, and another Indiana law that would have banned abortions related to sex, race, and disability. In particular, an issue there was Down syndrome. And Judge Barrett was dissenting in both of those cases, but her rulings gave a lot of cheer to groups like the Susan B. Anthony list for whom abortion is a major, major issue. Okay, so who else is on the list? Well, another top candidate is Barbara Lagoa. She was unknown to me until this weekend. She's formerly of the Florida Supreme Court. President Trump put her on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. She's from Miami, a Cuban-American.

Her husband has long ties to the Federalist Society, that famous conservative group of lawyers around the country. And President Trump has had some very positive things to say about her, even though he doesn't know her well. She's an extraordinary person. I've heard incredible things about her. I don't know her. She's Hispanic and highly respected. Miami, highly respected.

Well, and I will say, as I started texting people on Saturday morning, her name was the name that people kept sending, saying, like, don't count her out. Don't just assume it's Amy Coney Barrett. Yeah, there's been a lot of lobbying for her from people in Florida and beyond. I've heard that former Senator George Lemieux was making calls over the weekend on her behalf. That's Lagoa. And there are three more on this shortlist, though names we don't hear as frequently. Yeah, one is Joan Larson from Michigan, although I hear she might be less of a contender. And the other two, Tam, are young. By young, I mean like 38 years old.

Like younger than us young. Yeah, right. Alison Jones Rushing was born in 1982. And she's currently on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She's a favorite of evangelicals. She did some interning work or some work with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which frequently raises people's religious objections in cases involving LGBTQ issues. Rushing does have a really good pedigree. She clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch when he was on a lower court. So young, but sterling credentials. And then Kate Todd, you may know her, Tam. She's currently in

the White House Counsel's Office helping to pick judges. She also is a former Clarence Thomas clerk and had come from the Chamber of Commerce most recently. So here's the question I have. Sue and Carrie, is there anything that Democrats can do to stop this train a rolling? And does the person the president picks, does it matter? There's minor procedural tools that they can do to slow walk it out of committee a little bit and slow walk it on the floor a little bit, but not ultimately to block it from happening in the era where there's no longer filibusters for judicial nominees. I think, yeah, I do think the who matters. I think the who matters a lot. If it's someone that I think that the examples that Kerry has given, like an Amy Coney Barron, a Barbara Lagoa, these are known quantities to

the Senate. These are people that senators would feel comfortable with. Unless there was something about their personal or private lives that came to light in the course of the confirmation, they would probably be harder to attack. I mean, it's much harder to attack an actual person than the idea of what someone's trying to do. And I think the fact there's, look, there's a lot of gender politics at play here. This is refilling a seat of iconic female justice. I think Republicans see this as an opportunity to put up their own conservative woman, potentially a woman of color. They see that as very good politics, not just for the president, but for the party. And the quality of nominees always matters. So yeah, I really do think it does matter. And age matters. We're talking about people who are all, you know, young on the younger side, late 40s, early 50s, people who could serve if they live as long as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 30 plus years on the Supreme Court. All right. Well, I know for sure that this is not the last we will have of this conversation

this week or in the weeks to come. There's something about a Supreme Court vacancy that blocks the sun when it comes to politics. So we will leave it there for today. You can find all the ways to stay connected with us by following the links in the description of this episode. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Carrie Johnson, National Justice Correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. And a special thanks to our funder, The Little Market, for helping to support this podcast.