Despite persistent questioning from the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett stuck to the standard practice of declining to reveal how she would rule on future high court cases, and she refused to provide her judicial views on Obamacare or the legal rights of gay Americans.
“I don’t have an agenda,” Barrett told top Judiciary Democrat Dianne Feinstein, of California, after Feinstein repeatedly interrogated Barrett about her personal opinion on the two topics.
“Senator, I have no agenda,” Barrett told Feinstein after Feinstein questioned whether Barrett’s allegiance to the late Justice Antonin Scalia signaled she’ll “vote to roll back hard-fought freedoms and protections for the LGBT community.” Scalia was among the dissenting justices in the high court decision legalizing gay marriage, and Barrett has said several times she embraces Scalia’s judicial philosophy.
“If I were confirmed, you would be getting Justice Barrett, not Justice Scalia,” Barrett told Feinstein. “So I don’t think that anybody should assume that just because Justice Scalia decided a decision a certain way that I would too.”
Feinstein led the Democratic line of questioning with an attempt to get Barrett to reveal her views on the legality of Obamacare.
The matter is critical to Democrats because the high court will hear a case that could overturn the law on Nov. 10, just a week after the Nov. 3 election.
Feinstein pointed to Barrett’s writing that questioned the 2012 Supreme Court ruling upholding Obamacare’s individual mandate. Barrett wrote that Chief Justice John Roberts “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning.”
But Barrett argued to Feinstein that the upcoming Supreme Court case “is not the same issue,” and will require the high court to decide whether the now-eliminated mandate can be severed from the rest of Obamacare without the entire law collapsing.
“And that’s not something that I’ve ever talked about with respect to the Affordable Care Act.”
Barrett cited the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s philosophy that Supreme Court nominees should provide Congress with no indication of how they would rule in cases that end up before the court.
Barrett told lawmakers she does not want to provide future litigants with any indication of how she would rule on cases.
“I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference, and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference,” Barrett said. “Like racism, I think discrimination is abhorrent. On the questions of law. however, because I’m a sitting judge, and because you can’t answer questions without going through the judicial process, I can’t give answers to those very specific questions.”
