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After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on Friday, President Trump made one thing clear: He would be nominating a new justice as soon as possible, with the hopes of filling Ginsburg’s seat before a president is sworn in next year, if not before the November election.
Now, according to the New York Times, the president has followed through on his promise, selecting Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the nominee. The Times reports Trump is planning to announce her as his choice on Saturday, according to “people close to the process who asked not to be identified disclosing the decision in advance.” Barrett, a conservative, was previously reported to be a frontrunner for the position, along with Judge Barbara Lagoa.
CNN also reported the news, but clarified that sources said until an official announcement, “there is always the possibility that Trump makes a last-minute change.”
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “The Senate will vote on this nomination this year,” though he didn’t specify whether the vote would happen before the presidential election or prior to the start of a new session in 2021, according to NPR.
FiveThirtyEight reports that a majority of Americans are in favor of letting the election winner choose the new justice. In considering 12 polls, on average, 52 percent of respondents said the government should wait on the nomination process.
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Barrett is currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. If confirmed, she will be the youngest justice on the bench, according to the New York Times.
She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia in the past, and was a faculty member at Notre Dame Law School, her alma mater. She earned “praise from colleagues as an astute scholar and jurist, even if they did not always agree on her jurisprudential premises,” the Times reports.
Her peers have called her a “textualist,” and “one who interprets the law based on its plain words, as opposed to someone who looks to accomplish the legislature’s purpose,” according to the Times. She has also been described as an “originalist,” or “a judge who interprets the Constitution according to the understanding of those who drafted and ratified it.”
Barrett is reportedly conservative and Catholic. In a 2013 Notre Dame Magazine article, John Nagy writes that Barrett believes “life begins at conception.”
For more on Barrett, click here.
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