Trump nominates Amy Coney Barrett as Supreme Court Justice – VG

There has been tension for the past week over who the president of the United States would nominate as Supreme Court justice after liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg (87) died on Friday of last week.

On Saturday night Norwegian time, it became clear that Trump will nominate law professor Amy Coney Barrett.

Barrett dated his family and Donald Trump in front of the White House before the nomination.

– We are now meeting in Rosehagen to continue our task of ensuring justice and the “rule of law”. Today, I am honored to nominate one of our sharpest and smartest court chiefs to the Supreme Court. She is a woman without equal and loyal to the constitution, said Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump, among others, when she was nominated.

Barrett was designated early as Trump’s first choice. The president has made it clear that he wanted to nominate a woman.

– This was not surprising, and is an example of a common strategy used in the Republican Party: to replace icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they find a woman with a good story behind, but with completely opposite points of view. This makes it difficult to criticize it, Jennifer Leigh Bailey, American expert and professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at NTNU tells VG.

Tribute to Ginsburg

– Thank you president. I am deeply honored by the trust I have received from you. I love the United States and I love the Constitution of the United States. I am truly honored by the idea of ​​serving on the Supreme Court, Barrett said when speaking at Rosehagen.

At the beginning of his speech, he turned his attention to the late Ginsburg.

– If I am approved by the Senate, I will remember who was before me. The flag of the United States is still at half mast to commemorate Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg not only destroyed the glass ceiling, he broke it, he continued.

He also described Ginsburg as a woman of enormous talent and said that her life in public service is an example for everyone to follow.

Barrett further states that a judge must apply the law as it is written.

“Judges do not make decisions and must set aside the policies that they support themselves,” Barrett said.

– Will look back

Norwegian-American expert Geir Stenseth, who is a professor at the University of Oslo Law School, tells VG that Barrett fits the Trump profile well.

– She appears to be a strong conservative social judge based on what she has written and judged before, she says and adds that Barrett is also a judge with a clear conservative view on how the constitution should be interpreted.

– It is based on text, either by the constitutional text or by a regular legal text. Furthermore, she is an originalist: she tries to identify the constitution based on what the original intention was, not on how we interpret the Constitution in Norway.

If Barrett is approved in the Senate, she and the other two conservative justices Trump has appointed will look much further back at what the fathers of the constitution meant than at what equal social groups in society need constitutional protection today. , Stenseth believes.

– Trump has positioned the Supreme Court in a conservative values ​​direction. The last three appointments are on the conservative side of values. Therefore, this will be of great importance for many years, because you want a majority in the Supreme Court that will lean towards the conservatives.

Mother of seven

Barrett is 48 years old and hails from the city of New Orleans in the southern United States state of Louisiana. He is popular with abortion opponents and was among the finalists the last time a new Supreme Court justice was appointed.

In the quote above, when Brett Kavanaugh ended up as Supreme Court Justice, Trump said he “saved her for Ginsburg.”

Barrett grew up as one of seven siblings in a Catholic family, and she has had seven children herself and is now a practicing Catholic.

On several occasions, they have wondered if her beliefs make her morally critical in jurisprudence.

He has also been an aide to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and conservative voices hope he will follow in his footsteps, writes the New York Times.

Against abortion

As an employee of the Catholic University of Notre-Dame in Indiana, Barret has partnered with the anti-abortion group Faculty for Life. In 2015, he signed a joint letter supporting the “value of human life from conception to natural death,” and that marriage “is based on an inextricable obligation between a man and a woman.”

He has criticized Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that led to the legalization of abortion in the United States. However, he has also said that the court is unlikely to overturn this decision, Forbes writes.

In 2018, Barrett stated that the abortion controversy is now about funding.

“It’s a question of whether abortions should be publicly or privately funded,” he said.

If the nomination is supported by a majority in the Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans, six of the nine justices on the United States Supreme Court will be conservative. It is a weighting that will remain locked for several years.

Trump has declared that he wants a vote before the November 3 election, which is 41 days away.

On average, it has taken 69 days to approve a judge, according to the Congressional Corps of Investigation.

If the Trump camp does not have time to appoint a new Supreme Court justice before the election, and Democrat Joe Biden wins, Biden may appoint a liberal judge who can influence abortion decisions, environmental regulations, the authority of the president and voting rules for a long time.

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