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FAYETTEVILLE, North Carolina: President Donald Trump said Saturday (September 19) that he will nominate a woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, a move that would tilt the court further to the right following the death of the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“I will present a nominee next week. It will be a woman,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
“I think it should be a woman because I actually like women a lot more than men.”
As Trump spoke, supporters chanted, “Fill that seat.”
Earlier, he praised two women as possible options for the US Supreme Court: conservatives who he elevated to federal appeals courts.
Trump, with the opportunity to nominate a third judge for a lifetime term, named Amy Coney Barrett of the Chicago-based 7th Circuit and Barbara Lagoa of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit as potential nominees.
READ: Mourners across America honor pioneer Ginsburg
Ginsburg’s death Friday from cancer after 27 years on the court gave Trump, who is seeking reelection on November 3, the opportunity to expand his conservative majority to 6-3 at a time of a huge political divide in the United States United.
Any nomination would require approval in the Senate, where Trump’s Republicans have a 53-47 majority.
Not all Republican senators supported the measure: Susan Collins of Maine said Saturday that a nomination should wait.
“In fairness to the American people, who will either re-elect the president or select a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court must be made by the president who is elected on November 3,” Collins said, facing a tough race. for reelection herself, she said on Twitter.
Democrats are still furious about the Republican Senate’s refusal in 2016 to act on Democratic President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died 10 months before that election, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell then said that the Senate should not act on a candidate during an election year. That position has changed now.
Even if Democrats win the White House and a Senate majority in the November election, Trump and McConnell could push their election before the new president and Congress are sworn in on January 3.
Senior Congressional Democrats raised the possibility of adding more judges next year to counter Trump’s nominees if they gain control of the White House and Senate.
“Let me be clear: If Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with this, then there is nothing off the table for next year,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told fellow Democrats at a conference call on Saturday, according to a source who heard the call.
McConnell, who has prioritized the confirmation of Trump’s federal judicial nominees, said the House would vote on any Trump nominees. Democrats, with few tools to block the passage of a nominee, plan to try to rally public opposition.
“The focus should be to show the public what is at stake in this fight. And what is at stake is really people’s access to affordable health care, workers’ rights and women’s rights,” she said Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen in a telephone interview.
Obama on Saturday called on Senate Republicans to respect what he called McConnell’s “made up” principle in 2016.
“A basic principle of the law, and of daily justice, is that we apply the rules consistently and not based on what is convenient or advantageous at the time,” Obama said in a statement posted online.
AMY CONEY BARRETT AND BARBARA LAGOA
Even before Ginsburg’s death, Trump had released a list of possible nominees.
Barrett has generated perhaps the most interest in conservative circles. A devout Roman Catholic, she was a legal scholar at Notre Dame Law School in Indiana before Trump appointed her to the Seventh Circuit in 2017. Abortion rights groups have pointed to Barrett’s conservative religious views and have said that, As a judge, he would likely vote to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade who legalized abortion across the country.
Lagoa has served on the US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for less than a year after Trump appointed her and the Senate confirmed her in a vote of 80-15. Before that, less than a year in her previous position as the first Latina on the Florida Supreme Court, after more than a decade as a judge in an intermediate court of appeals in the state.
Another candidate Trump had previously considered is Amul Thapar. He was a district court judge in Kentucky, the first federal judge of South Asian descent, before Trump appointed him to the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit in 2017.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to appoint justices who would revoke Roe v. Wade, a longtime target of conservative activists. Even with the current conservative majority, the court voted 5-4 in July to repeal a restrictive abortion law in Louisiana.
Trump has already appointed two justices: Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Kavanaugh was shortly confirmed after a heated confirmation process in which he angrily denied allegations by a California university professor, Christine Blasey Ford, of assaulting her. sexually in 1982, when the two were high school students in Maryland.
SENATE RACES FOCUS
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said Saturday that if Democrats win in November, rushing a Senate court election would be “undemocratic.”
He said on Twitter: “Congress would have to act and expanding the court would be the right place to start.”
With Democrats fighting hard to win control of the tightly divided Senate, confirmation votes could also add pressure to sitting Republican senators in competitive electoral races, including Collins and Martha McSally of Arizona.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican not ready for reelection this cycle, told local media on Friday, before Ginsburg’s death, that she would not vote for a Supreme Court candidate this close to the election. .
