As the battle over the Supreme Court vacancy continues to heat up, liberal advocacy groups and some Democrats are homing in on federal appeals court Judge Amy Coney Barrett and raising concerns about her ability to balance her role as a justice with her Catholic faith.
A number of liberal groups launched campaigns on Twitter on Monday in opposition to Barrett, warning that, if nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court, she would jeopardize Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act.
[Related: Chuck Schumer hits Supreme Court contender Amy Coney Barrett over abortion, Obamacare]
But some of the groups also charged that Barrett will put her religious views over her role as a justice and suggested that, because of she is a devout Catholic, Barrett should not hear cases involving abortion or same-sex marriage.
“Amy Coney Barrett believes judges should be bound by their religious faith — not the law,” Friends of the Earth warned its supporters. “She doesn’t belong on our nation’s highest court.”
“Amy Coney Barrett has been perfectly clear — she wants to overturn #RoevWade. She also belongs to a group that both refers to woman as ‘handmaids’ (no, we’re not joking) & believes that husbands are in charge of their wives. She’s on Trump’s #SCOTUS shortlist,” NARAL Pro-Choice America tweeted.
“A religious group in which members take an oath of loyalty to each other and are supervised by a male ‘head’ or female ‘handmaiden.’ That looks like a cult. Now she wants a seat on SCOTUS for the sole purpose of overturning Roe v. Wade. The answer is NO,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s former ethics chief who is running for the Senate as a Democrat in Minnesota, tweeted.
“This cultish group is NOT the Catholic Church. So don’t even try playing the ‘anti-Catholic bigotry’ card,” he said in a subsequent tweet.
Painter and NARAL both referenced a September article in the New York Times that highlighted Barrett’s membership in a group called People of Praise. Members, the article said, “swear a lifelong oath of loyalty” to one another and receive a personal adviser — once called a “head” for men and a “handmaiden” for women.
[Opinion: Here come the attacks on Supreme Court candidate Amy Coney Barrett’s faith we all knew would happen]
But the article received condemnation, with some noting that Pope Francis has embraced the group and invited its members to Rome last year.
The message from Barrett’s detractors regarding her faith have raised concerns among legal scholars and conservatives that liberal groups are imposing a religious test for judges.
“People on the Left often talk about normalizing bad things, but what they’re very clearly doing is normalizing really blunt attacks on traditional religious beliefs,” Adam White, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and director of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, told the Washington Examiner.
“They’re normalizing the attacks on Catholics and opening the door to attacks on Orthodox Jews or Muslims or others in the political sphere.”
White warned that any person who lives out his or her religious beliefs “are now going to be opened up to really blunt political warfare thanks to the normalization” and said attacks on Barrett’s religious beliefs demonstrate an “utter disrespect” for the Constitution’s prohibition on religious tests for office.
Barrett is considered one of the front-runners to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, who notified Trump last week he will be retiring at the end of July.
Trump reportedly interviewed Barrett, as well as federal appeals court judges Brett Kavanaugh, Raymond Kethledge, and Amul Thapar on Monday. He also spoke with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, about the Supreme Court vacancy that same day.
White House spokesman Raj Shah said Trump additionally spoke to three potential nominees Tuesday.
Barrett, a mother of seven, has a relatively thin judicial record, having spent 15 years as a professor at the Notre Dame Law School. But conservatives praise her credentials — she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court — and note that, at 46, she could serve for at least three decades on the Supreme Court.
While advocacy groups are raising concerns with Barrett’s Catholic faith in the context of a possible Supreme Court nomination, she faced such questions after President Trump nominated her to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year.
During her confirmation hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told Barrett “the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern.”
Feinstein’s comments were condemned by the heads of Notre Dame and Princeton University, as well as by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
White said it’s possible Barrett may have flown under the radar during her confirmation hearing had Feinstein not made such a comment, but said the attacks have elevated her.
“Her stoic and very poised enduring of those attacks really elevated her profile,” he said. “She was pretty brave to take this and not back down and see things all the way.”
John Malcolm, the director of the Meese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, echoed that Barrett was “grace under fire” during her confirmation hearings.
“Making arguments like that is not exactly new,” he told the Washington Examiner of liberal groups’ criticisms of Barrett. “That’s what a lot of people said about John F. Kennedy when he was running for president. They said he would be the pope’s president and would govern the country according to his Catholic faith.”
Malcolm also drew comparisons between Barrett’s response regarding her ability to execute her duties as a judge and Scalia’s comments about his faith and role as a justice.
“He gave many, many speeches that talked about his approach to judging and said he would come out with results he might like as a Catholic and might not like,” he said.
Trump is expected to announce his nominee to the Supreme Court on Monday.
