Supreme Court: Republicans push Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination

Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in Supreme Court late Monday by a deeply divided Senate, with Republicans dominating Democrats to install President Donald Trump’s nominee days before the election and secure a likely conservative majority in court in the next years.

Trump’s decision to fill the vacancy of the late liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg potentially opens a new era of rulings on abortion, the Affordable Care Act and even his own choice.

Democrats couldn’t stop the outcome, Trump’s third judge on the court, as Republicans compete to reshape the judiciary.

Barrett is 48 years old and his lifetime appointment as judge number 115 will solidify the court’s lean to the right.

“This is a momentous day for America,” Trump said at a primetime inauguration event on the South Lawn of the White House.

Judge Clarence Thomas administered the constitutional oath to Barrett before a crowd of about 200 people.

Barrett will be able to participate in court after taking the judicial oath administered by Chief Justice John Roberts in a private court ceremony on Tuesday.

Barrett told those gathered that he learned through “rigorous confirmation” that “a judge’s job is to resist his political preferences.”

She vowed, “I will do my job without fear or favor.”

Monday’s vote was the closest high court confirmation to a presidential election and the first in modern times without the support of the minority party.

The acute Covid-19 crisis has taken over the proceedings. Vice President Mike Pence’s office said Monday that he will not preside over the Senate session unless his runoff vote is needed after Democrats asked him to stay away when his aides tested positive for Covid-19. The vote was 52-48, and Pence’s vote was not necessary.

“Voting to confirm this nominee should make every senator proud,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, dismissing the “outlandish” criticism in a lengthy speech.

During a rare weekend session, he declared that Barrett’s opponents “won’t be able to do much about it for a long time.”

Pence’s presence presiding over the vote would have been expected, showing Republican priority. But Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and his leadership team said it would not only violate the virus guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “it would also be a violation of common decency and courtesy.”

To underscore the political division during the pandemic, Republican senators, most in masks, sat in their seats as is tradition in historic voting and applauded the result with their fists.

Democratic senators were not present, taking Schumer’s advice not to stay in the chamber.

Some Republican senators tested positive for the coronavirus following a rose garden event with Trump to announce Barrett’s nomination last month, but have since returned from quarantine.

Democrats argued for weeks that the vote was being unduly rushed, insisting during an all-night Sunday session that it should be the winner of the Nov. 3 election who names the candidate.

However, Barrett, a judge for the Indiana federal appeals court, is expected to quickly sit down and begin hearing cases. Speaking around midnight Sunday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called the vote “illegitimate” and “the last gasp.” of a desperate party “.

Several issues are awaiting a decision just a week before Election Day, and Barrett could be a swing vote in Republican appeals of orders extending deadlines for absentee ballots in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

The judges are also weighing Trump’s emergency request for the court to prevent the Manhattan district attorney from obtaining his tax returns. And on November 10, the court is expected to hear the Trump-backed challenge to the Obama-era Affordable Care Act.

Just before the Senate vote began, the court sided with Republicans by refusing to extend the deadline for absentee ballots in Wisconsin.

Trump has said he wanted to quickly install a ninth judge to resolve election disputes and is hopeful the judges will end the “Obamacare” healthcare law.

During several days of public testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barrett was careful not to reveal how he would fail in such cases.

He introduced himself as a neutral referee and suggested, “It’s not Amy’s law.”

But his writings against abortion and a ruling on “Obamacare” show a deeply conservative thinker.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., Chair of the Judiciary Committee, praised the mother of seven as a role model for conservative women.

“This is historic,” Graham said. Republicans focused on their Catholic faith and criticized earlier questions from Democrats about their beliefs.

Graham called Barrett “blatantly pro-life.”

At the beginning of Trump’s presidency, McConnell engineered a Senate rule change to allow confirmation by a majority of 100 senators, rather than the 60-vote threshold traditionally needed to advance nominees to the superior court on the objections.

That was an escalation of a rule change that Democrats launched to promote other judicial and administrative candidates under President Barack Obama. Republicans are making a political leap into election days on November 3 with the presidency and the Senate majority at stake.

Only one Republican, Sen. Susan Collins, who is in a fierce fight for reelection in Maine, voted against the nominee, not by any direct evaluation of Barrett.

Rather, Collins said, “I don’t think it’s fair or consistent to have a Senate confirmation vote before the election.”

Trump and his Republican allies hoped for a campaign boost, much as Trump generated excitement among conservatives and evangelical Christians in 2016 over a court vacancy.

That year, McConnell refused to allow the Senate to consider then-President Barack Obama’s choice to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, arguing that the new president should decide.

Most of the other Republicans facing tough careers embraced the candidate who worked for the late Scalia to bolster his position with the Conservatives.

Senator Thom Tillis, RN.C., said in a speech Monday that Barrett “will go down in history as one of the great justices.”

But it is not clear that the extraordinary effort to install new justice over such opposition in a hot election year will pay political rewards to the Republican Party.

Demonstrations for and against the nominee have been quieter on Capitol Hill under coronavirus restrictions. Democrats rallied against Barrett.

While two Democratic senators voted to confirm Barrett in 2017 after Trump nominated the Notre Dame Law School professor to the court of appeal, neither voted to confirm her in superior court.

In a display of the party’s priorities, California Senator Kamala Harris, nominated for the vice presidency, returned to Washington from the election campaign to join her colleagues with a negative vote.

No other Supreme Court magistrate has been confirmed in a recorded vote without the support of the minority party in at least 150 years, according to information provided by the Senate Historical Office.