Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, had warned last year that the judicial confirmation process “has gotten very brutal.”
Her comments came in a forum at the University of Notre Dame in April 2019. The National Review detailed her comments and posted the video of the discussion on its website.
“Part of that is because people have a fundamental misunderstanding of the judicial role,” Barrett said. “If you think that the judge who is going to be confirmed to a court of appeals or to the Supreme Court is going to be imposing his or her policy preferences on you, then it leads to kind of this all in — ‘we have to take this person down if we think we’re going to disagree with the policy preferences.’”
And she explained how she tries to remain impartial.
“I try to put myself in the shoes of the party that I’m going to rule against. And so as I’m writing the opinion, or as I’m trying to decide how I’m going to vote at conference, I imagine that it was my daughter, or me, or my husband that was in that situation, and think, ‘could I still reach the same result?’ Could I respect the reasoning? And am I really doing it in a way that smokes out any kind of policy impulse that I have to go the other way?”
When she was nominated on Saturday, she said: "I pledge to respond the responsibilities to the best of my ability. I love the United States and I love the United States Constitution."
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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