President Donald Trump is expected to name Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee on Saturday, multiple sources have reported, setting off a heated confirmation battle to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vacant seat just 38 days before the election. The selection is the latest development in the GOP’s transparent scramble to tilt the nation’s highest court further to the right with a nominee who, if confirmed, would form a 6-3 conservative majority, potentially impacting a generation of rulings on issues ranging from Obamacare to immigration to abortion. Sources, citing Trump’s tendency to change his mind, cautioned that the president could announce someone else but said that Barrett is the expected choice. In Washington on Friday night, Trump confirmed to reporters that he had come to a decision. “In my own mind, yes,” he said, per Politico. Asked about Barrett, who Trump nominated to the federal bench in 2017, the president said: “I haven’t said it was her but she is outstanding.”
Barrett, a federal appellate judge and Notre Dame law professor who once clerked for late right-wing Justice Antonin Scalia, has been the leading contender on Trump’s shortlist of picks and is the only nominee known to have met with the president in person. “She was the plan all along,” a former senior administration official told CNN, adding that “she has the strongest support among the legal conservatives who have dedicated their lives to the court” and “will contribute most to the court’s jurisprudence in the years and decades to come.” As Politico notes, Barrett will likely receive broad support from Senate Republicans given that she was in consideration two years ago for the seat that ultimately went to Brett Kavanaugh, as well as her conservative stance on issues like abortion—Barrett reportedly stated that “life begins at conception” during a 2013 speech on Roe v. Wade—and the Affordable Care Act. In 2018, Trump reportedly told confidants that he was “saving her for Ginsburg.”
The appointment would bring Trump one step closer to delivering on the promise he made on the debate stage four years ago, when he vowed to nominate only “pro-life” justices to the Supreme Court. Despite the fact that she has been a judge for only three years and would be the sitting justice with the least courtroom experience, Barrett’s conservative background and popularity among right-wing advocates—especially religious ones—position her as an obvious pick who political advisers hope will galvanize Trump’s conservative base in the weeks before they head to the polls. “Amy Coney Barrett meets Donald Trump’s two main litmus tests: She has made clear she would invalidate the A.C.A. and take health care away from millions of people and undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom,” Nan Aron, the president of Alliance for Justice, a progressive legal policy coalition, told the New York Times.
Barrett’s views were equal cause for celebration and warning on Friday. Opponents of the nomination cited her “track record of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric” and the threat her appointment poses to reproductive rights, a prospect that her conservative supporters celebrated. “It’s go time! Get ready for a post Roe v Wade America! #ProLifeGen Assemble! This is what we were made for and have been preparing for,” tweeted Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life. “She is the perfect combination of brilliant jurist and a woman who brings the argument to the court that is potentially the contrary to the views of the sitting women justices,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, told CBS. “Judge Amy Coney Barrett is an excellent selection who has shown a rock-solid commitment to originalism and the Constitution,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh said, per Politico.