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reuters
The disappearance of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal Supreme Court judge appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993, was a blast in the race for the White House, with Election Day just over six weeks to go. Suddenly the pandemic, racial conflicts, global warming – the three main axes of the electoral campaign – have taken a back seat, overtaken on the political agenda by the furious battle for the Supreme Court. Donald Trump does not intend to leave the vacancy until after the election, as Democrats but also some members of his own party ask him: on Saturday, during a rally in Fayetteville in North Carolina, the president anticipated that he will announce the Appointment ” next week “, and that will be a woman” very talented and very bright. “
Trump urged the Senate to vote on his appointment “without delay,” but there are already two major defections among members of the Republican Party. In both cases, they are women: Maine Senator Susan Collins, according to which “the decision on the life appointment to the Supreme Court must be made by the president, who will be elected on November 3″ on a question of ” justice for the American people “; and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who had already stated in recent weeks that she would not support an eventual appointment so soon after the vote. The leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, – the same one who in 2016 blocked the appointment of a judge by Obama some 10 months after his mandate – has ensured however that the Trump candidate will obtain the vote in the ‘classroom of the Senate. To do this, he can do without just three Republican senators.
From a constitutional point of view, Trump’s decision to name Ginsburg as his successor without waiting for the election result is perfectly legal. It is from the point of view of political expediency that the appointment raises strong doubts, because it would push the composition of the country’s highest judicial body even further to the right: of 9 members, 6 would be Republican nominations, 3 of which were elected by the Trump himself. . For critics, giving such a strong note at the end of the term is equivalent to forcing; for him, it is clearly an unmissable opportunity. “Fill that seat,” his supporters yelled at him yesterday during the rally in North Carolina. “This is new: take that seat. Let’s make a T-shirt, it’s a good idea “, Donald joked, before promising:” That’s what we are going to do, we will replace it “,” for me it is a moral obligation “.
At the top of the president’s list is Amy Coney Barrett, a former Assistant Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away in 2016 and was nominated by Trump to the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. At 48, Barrett could hold the job for several decades. Trump’s first two candidates for the United States Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, are 53 and 55, respectively. Trump’s justices will potentially represent a third of the Supreme Court for generations. The other name we are talking about in these hours is Barbara Lagoa, 52, born in Miami and the daughter of Cuban immigrants, a federal judge in Atlanta.
A devout Catholic and strongly opposed to abortion, Barrett has a special fondness for Trump’s conservative base. She has articulated anti-abortion views in the past and is a member of the Catholic group People of Praise, which pledges “allegiance” to adherents and assigns them personal advisers. He has seven children, two of whom are adopted in Haiti. He publicly criticized the landmark Roe v. Wade, who legalized abortion in the United States, arguing that the ruling “created a legal framework for abortion on demand.” However, he also called the hypothesis that the Court would ever annul the decision as “highly unlikely.” “The controversy right now is about funding,” she said in 2018. “It’s a question of whether abortions will be publicly or privately funded.”
Trump’s promise to appoint very conservative and anti-abortion judges was one of the workhorses of his choice in 2016 to mobilize his most militant base. Four years later, the issue remains one of the most popular among Trump supporters, starting with the evangelical right. Bader Ginsburg, in his political will, had left his will: “I ask that the new president replace me.” A ten-year career as a true defender of women’s rights. Replacing her with an anti-abortion member a few weeks before the vote, the Democrats charge, would be an insult to her memory. Welcome to one of the fiercest battles in America.
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