President Trump appoints Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court
President Donald Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Saturday, capping a dramatic reshaping of the federal judiciary that will resonate for a generation and that he hopes will provide a needed boost to his reelection effort.
Barrett, a former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, said she was “truly humbled” by the nomination and quickly aligned herself with Scalia’s conservative approach to the law, saying his “judicial philosophy is mine, too.”
Barrett, 48, was joined in the Rose Garden by her husband and seven children. If confirmed by the Senate, she would fill the seat vacated by liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It would be the sharpest ideological swing since Clarence Thomas replaced Justice Thurgood Marshall nearly three decades ago.
I don’t particularly like that Barrett is Catholic or that she has adopted Haitians, but she appears to be sincere in her faith, she is almost certainly reliable on abortion, she doesn’t seem to have a plethora of questionable decisions behind her, and she appears to be sound on guns and immigration. While it is simply wrong for a white Protestant nation to be ruled over by a haphazard collection of Catholics and other minorities, there is no question that Barrett should be a marked improvement on the late, unlamented Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
But we will have to wait and see how it goes. We simply can’t know if she is a ticket-taker or not, or what the ramifications of that will prove to be.