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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In planning Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, President Donald Trump selected a federal appeals court judge who has defended conservative legal positions on key issues in three years on the bench. .
Trump intends to name Barrett, a favorite of religious conservatives, on Saturday to a lifetime job on the Supreme Court to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, two sources said Friday.
Barrett, 48, was appointed by Trump to the Chicago-based US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. She has proven to be reliably conservative in that position, voting in favor of one of the immigration policies of Trump’s hardliner and showing his support for expansive gun rights. She was also the author of a ruling that makes it easier for college students accused of sexual assault on campus to sue their institutions.
Abortion rights groups have expressed concern that Barrett will vote as a judge to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade who legalized abortion across the country.
Although he has not yet spoken directly on abortion, Barrett twice noted his opposition to rulings that overturned Republican-backed abortion-related restrictions in Indiana – one in 2018 that required fetal remains to be buried or cremated after one abortion, the other in 2019 involving parental notification. – voting for those decisions to be reconsidered.
In February 2019, Barrett joined a ruling that upheld a Chicago measure imposing limits on anti-abortion activists gathered outside abortion clinics. The ruling, written by Judge Diane Sykes, said the court had to apply Supreme Court precedent.
During her 2017 confirmation hearing for her current position, US Senator Dianne Feinstein told Barrett: “The dogma lives loudly within you.” Barrett said his religious faith would not affect his decisions as a judge.
In June, Barrett disagreed when a three-judge panel ruled in favor of a challenge to Trump’s policy of denying legal permanent residency to certain immigrants who are likely to need government assistance in the future. In January, the Supreme Court, driven by its conservative majority, allowed the policy to go into effect.
She also authored a ruling that makes it easy for college students who have been accused of sexual assault to question the way their schools handle their cases. Barrett and her colleagues revived a lawsuit by a student who had been suspended from Purdue University after allegations of sexual assault. She accused the school of discriminating against her because of her gender.
She wrote that in the case it was plausible that Purdue officials chose to believe the accuser “because she is a woman” and not believe the accused student “because he is a man.”
Barrett indicated his support for gun rights in a 2019 dissent when he objected to the court’s ruling that a non-violent offender could be permanently barred from owning a firearm.
“Founding legislatures did not strip criminals of the right to bear arms simply because of their criminal status,” Barrett wrote.
CONSERVATIVE REGISTRY
The New Orleans-born Barrett received her law degree from Notre Dame Law School, a Catholic institution in Indiana. She is a devout Catholic. She is married to Jesse Barrett, a private practice attorney and former federal prosecutor in Indiana. They have seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti.
She previously served as a secretary to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative who died in 2016.
In a 1998 law magazine article, she and another author said that Catholic judges who are faithful to the teachings of their church are morally excluded from enforcing the death penalty and must recuse themselves in certain cases.
Abortion rights groups, concerned with preserving the 1973 ruling that a woman has the constitutional right to abort, point to a 2003 law magazine article in which Barrett argued that the courts could be more flexible to overturn ” previous errors in precedents.
Barrett has also spoken publicly about his belief that life begins at conception, according to a 2013 article in Notre Dame magazine.
His writings also point to views on other controversial topics, including health. In a review article of the law published in 2017, he criticized the important 2012 ruling by conservative Chief Justice John Robert preserving Obamacare.
“Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” Barrett wrote.
Barrett and his family have been members of a Christian religious group called the People of Praise, according to other members.
Craig Lent, the group’s general coordinator, said in 2018 that the organization, which is officially ecumenical but whose membership is largely Catholic, focuses on close Christian ties and cares for one another. They also share a preference for charismatic worship, which may involve speaking in tongues.
Certain leadership positions are reserved for men. And while married men receive spiritual and other advice from other male members of the group, married women rely on their husbands for the same advice, Lent said.
“We are not unaware that this could be misunderstood. Each member is free and responsible for their own decisions. No one should be subservient, no one should be dominant,” Lent said.
Some women in leadership positions used to be called servants, but are now referred to as “female leaders,” Lent said, to avoid the perception of servility.
(Information by Andrew Chung and Lawrence Hurley; additional information by Téa Kvetenadze; edited by Will Dunham)
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