Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Trump. She is the third candidate and the first woman to be nominated to the highest court in the land under this president.
If confirmed, Judge Barrett would become just the 5th woman to be on the Supreme Court, following Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
Barrett is also the 6th overall woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Harriet Miers was on the path of becoming the third woman to be confirmed to the Supreme Court when she was nominated in 2005 by President George W. Bush, however, she faced bipartisan opposition and her nomination was shortly withdrawn in favor of eventual Justice Samuel Alito.
So, who exactly is Amy Coney Barrett?
Hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana, Barrett graduated from Rhodes College with honors and then studied law at Notre Dame Law School on a full scholarship. On top of being the executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review, she graduated first in her class summa cum laude in 1997.
Transitioning into the real world, Barrett spent two years as a judicial law clerk, first for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
After spending a few years in private practice, Barrett entrenched herself in the world of academia, beginning as a law and economics fellow at George Washington University before returning to her alma mater of Notre Dame Law School in 2002 where she taught constitutional law, federal courts, and statutory interpretation for the next 15 years.
Following her long stint in academia, Trump nominated Barrett to the 7th Circuit in May 2017, only a few months into his presidency.
Even though she received bipartisan support, Democrats were critical of Barrett’s Catholic faith. In her confirmation hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., suggested that Barrett’s faith would interfere in cases with how she interprets the Constitution, saying, “The dogma lives loudly within you.”
That comment is now infamous among Republicans as they’ve argued that Democrats are engaging in employing a “religious test” for office, which is unconstitutional.
The New York Times even published a story in September 2017 that gives credence to the religious criticism of Barrett by highlighting her membership in a small, tightly knit Christian group known as “People of Praise.” It suggests that it’s an ultra-religious cult where members take a loyalty oath and are assigned a personal adviser to hold them accountable, men are called “heads” and women are called “handmaids.” The reference to the group is an attempt by the Times to allude to the dystopian novel and television show, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” where women are dressed in red robes and white bonnets and treated as second-class citizens.
Barrett was confirmed to the bench in October 2017 by a vote of 55 to 43, even getting the votes of three Democratic senators: Joe Donnelly, Joe Manchin, and the 2016 vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.
Even though “People of Praise” never came up in the 2017 hearings, the foundation had been laid. In the eyes of her critics, Barrett’s faith is ripe for the picking. And there’s one reason why: the fear of overturning Roe v. Wade.
Roe v. Wade is the landmark decision that came down in 1973 in which the Supreme Court ruled that pregnant women are protected by the U.S. Constitution and given liberty to have an abortion, if they choose, without overreaching government restrictions. According to the Catholic Church, abortion is a grave sin, and in the Catechism, the book that explains the beliefs of Catholicism, “human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.”
Of course, Catholics are not monolithic.
Take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for example. She’s received a 100% rating from NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) as recently as 2019, signaling a fully pro-choice stance.
Vice President Joe Biden, on the other hand, has had mixed stances on abortion. In 2019, Biden was under fire from the 2020 Democratic presidential field for not calling for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, a provision barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the woman. He ended up reversing his position and called for the amendment’s repeal. Even then, Biden still secured NARAL’s endorsement for president in 2020.
Yet, there’s another reason why Barrett’s critics are worried: her past criticism of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
In a 2017 Notre Dame Law School article, Barrett expressed criticism of the ACA, highlighting how the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare in the NFIB v. Sebelius case in 2012, writing that the majority distorted the Constitution “to achieve […] a preferable result,” and that it expressed “a commitment to judicial restraint by creatively interpreting ostensibly clear statutory text, its approach is at odds with the statutory textualism to which most originalists subscribe.” She continued to quote her late mentor Justice Scalia, who argued that Obamacare should be renamed to “SCOTUScare.”
Do these opinions mean that Barrett will overturn Roe v. Wade and deem Obamacare unconstitutional? Not necessarily. She, after all, would only be an Associate Justice with a textualist and originalist judicial philosophy who doesn’t pick the cases that the Court will hear. That’s reserved for Chief Justice John Roberts. That being said, President Trump followed through on his promise to have Barrett fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat. And if her confirmation is successful, conservatives will have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.
