White House press secretary Sarah Sanders declined to provide any details of which of the four possible Supreme Court nominees President Trump met with on Monday and she dodged questions related to the president’s position on Roe v. Wade.
Sanders was peppered with questions during Monday’s White House press briefing as to which four contenders Trump interviewed at the White House, as well as whether any of those four were women.
[Also read: Poll finds 63 percent of Americans agree with Roe v. Wade]
Trump told reporters last week he would announce a successor to Justice Anthony Kennedy on July 9 and said his list was narrowed to five people, two of which were women.
“The president is being very thoughtful about this process,” Sanders told reporters. “He’s looking for certain characteristics which we’ve outlined and beyond that, I can tell you he met with four people today.”
Sanders said each meeting lasted around 45 minutes.
Trump told reporters earlier Monday he will meet with at least two or three other candidates this week.
The issue of abortion is likely to be a flashpoint in the upcoming confirmation battle, regardless of who Trump nominates to the Supreme Court.
Democrats and liberal advocacy groups have sounded the alarm that a court with five conservative justices would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that established a woman’s right to an abortion, and put the Affordable Care Act at risk.
The future of Roe is also a concern for Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, whose vote is pivotal for Republicans in the Senate, where there are 50 voting GOP senators.
Collins said Sunday she would not support a nominee who has demonstrated a “hostility” toward the 1973 decision and said a candidate who would overturn Roe “would indicate an activist agenda that I don’t want to see a judge have.”
When pressed about Trump’s position on Roe, Sanders declined to weigh in.
“The president is pro-life, but in terms of the process of selecting a Supreme Court nominee, as the president said last week, he’s not going to discuss specific cases with those nominees,” she told reporters.
During the presidential debate in October 2016, Trump said he would appoint “pro-life judges” to the Supreme Court and said that if he were to name two to three justices to the high court, Roe would be overturned.
