Former clerks for Justice Anthony Kennedy urged the Senate not to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court so close to Election Day.
In an op-ed for the New York Times published on Sunday, Jamie Crooks and Samir Deger-Sen said they believed confirming Barrett to the high court before the general election “threatens the very legitimacy of the court.”
“If Senate Republicans hastily confirm Judge Barrett in the middle of an election, when a clear majority of Americans would prefer that Congress focus on the nation’s economic recovery, that earned legitimacy will be put in jeopardy,” they wrote, adding later that the confirmation would be hypocritical since Senate Republicans denied a hearing for Judge Merrick Garland.
Garland, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016 to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
“We’re liberals. But we’re also institutionalists. We don’t urge postponing Judge Barrett’s confirmation because of her qualifications or originalist philosophy, and we don’t question the sincerity of her promise to approach each case impartially. Our concerns run deeper — that regardless of how or why Justice Barrett would vote on the momentous issues that would come before her, the court’s decisions won’t be accepted,” they continued.
According to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll, a majority of the public wants the Senate to confirm Barrett to the Supreme Court. Only 28% said they opposed her confirmation, while 21% said they had no opinion on the matter.
During an appearance on Fox News earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that filling the vacancy would be consistent with his decision to block a vote on Garland in 2016. “I said you’d have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy on the Supreme Court, occurring during a presidential election year, was confirmed by a Senate of a different party than the president. That was the situation in 2016. That would not be the situation in 2020,” he said.
On Sunday afternoon, the Senate voted to advance Barrett’s nomination, setting up a final confirmation vote sometime Monday. Democrats, who have urged Republicans to wait until after the winner of the 2020 presidential election is sworn in, voted unanimously against advancing Barrett’s nomination.
Trump picked Barrett, a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, for the high court after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September. Trump already has two other picks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, that have been confirmed to the Supreme Court.
