[ad_1]
Yesterday, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, officially announced that he will propose Judge Amy Coney Barrett as a new member of the Supreme Court to replace the famous jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away a week ago. Trump has hinted several times that she has chosen Barrett for her very conservative stances on some of the costliest issues on the Republican base, such as termination of pregnancy, the right to own guns and the extension of the national healthcare system. Coney Barrett, however, is fairly cross-sectionally described as a brilliant lawyer and a great teacher, even by people who don’t share her ideas.
Coney Barrett is 48 years old and was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father was a lawyer who worked for oil companies, his mother was a homemaker. At twenty-one, she married Jesse Barrett, a lawyer with a long career as a prosecutor. The Barretts live in South Bend, Indiana and have seven children: two of them have been adopted and are of Haitian descent, while the youngest has Down syndrome. Coney Barrett is openly Catholic and is part of a conservative Catholic congregation called People of praise.
Coney Barrett has devoted much of her life to an academic career: she taught at George Washington University School of Law and since 2002 she has worked at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where she was elected Professor of the Year three times. She also had experience as a lawyer and jurist: between 1998 and 1999 she worked as a collaborator of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016 and is considered the most influential conservative judge of the last half century.
In 2017, the Trump administration appointed her a judge on the Court of Appeals that has jurisdiction over Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, but for some time it appeared that Trump was “holding” Coney Barrett to an even more prestigious position, a source said. Axios last year: Coney Barrett’s relatively young age could sway the Supreme Court for the next three decades and move it decisively to the right, a stated target of GOP militants and officials for many years (currently judges appointed by There are 5 Presidents Republicans, those appointed by Democrats have been reduced to 3 after Ginsburg’s death).
As early as 2017, Coney Barrett stood out during her Senate confirmation trial, when she responded quite strongly to a question from Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein about any interference between her Catholic faith and the autonomy of thought required of a judge. Coney Barrett claimed the influence of faith in his life, but explained that it would not interfere with his judgment skills.
These days American newspapers are retrieving dozens of public speeches, articles and sentences written by Coney Barrett to understand how he thinks about some fundamental issues on which he will probably have to position himself in the coming years if it is confirmed in the Supreme Court (in the Senate, In the only chamber involved, Republicans seem to have the numbers to approve his appointment without much concern.)
On the termination of pregnancy, a topic much loved by the religious right, the New York Times notes that Coney Barrett’s appointment has the support of various groups who would like to ban him nationally. Coney Barrett has never commented directly on the famous Roe v. Wade, who in 1973 recognized the right to abortion in all states, but several experts are convinced that if he had the opportunity he would vote to abolish it: both for his conservative Catholic faith and for adhering to a current of thought called originalism – promoted by Antonin Scalia among others – which aims to interpret constitutional texts literally. And since abortion is not mentioned in the United States Constitution, its followers argue, there is no reason to legislate it at the national level.
“I tend to think that judges have an obligation to the Constitution,” Coney Barrett wrote in 2013 for the Texas Law Review: “And that consequently it is more legitimate to apply what he considers his best interpretation of the text, than to defend a measure that he considers clearly in conflict, even if it constitutes a legal precedent.”
Furthermore, judging by the sentences and his speeches, Coney Barrett is quite aligned with conservative thinking about the right to own guns: last year he criticized a federal law that prohibited possession of those convicted of certain crimes, arguing that it should be limited to violent crimes, and the death penalty, which despite his Catholic faith he approved against some convicts during his years as a judge.
[ad_2]
