President Trump says his Supreme Court nominee will be confirmed by the Senate “easily” before the 2020 presidential election on Nov. 3.
There’s a “tremendous amount of time,” the president said in a taped interview that aired Sunday on Fox News.
“I think we could have it done easily before the election,” he said, adding that they were “going to try and have it done quickly.”
“I think she’ll be confirmed […] relatively long before the election,” Trump said.
The president said his nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, will be a textualist. “Mostly, I’m looking for somebody that can interpret the Constitution as written,” he said. “We say it all the time and she is very strong on that.”
In accepting Trump’s nomination, Barrett on Saturday vowed to “faithfully and impartially discharge” her duties under the Constitution if confirmed to the high court.
“I pledge to discharge the responsibilities of this job to the very best of my ability,” Barrett said in the White House Rose Garden alongside the president. “I love the United States and I love the United States Constitution.”
Barrett also praised Ginsburg, who passed away last Friday. “Should I be confirmed, I will be mindful of who came before me,” she said, saying Ginsburg “not only broke glass ceilings—she smashed them. She was a woman of enormous talent and consequence,” Barrett said.
The 48-year-old jurist, who clerked under late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, also called Ginsburg her “mentor.”
Barrett also praised Scalia, saying, “His judicial philosophy is mine too: A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold.”
Meanwhile, Joe Biden says Barrett would try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act pushed by him and his former boss, Barack Obama.
“She has a written track record of disagreeing with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said in a statement. “She critiqued Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion upholding the law in 2012.”
“President Trump has been trying to throw out the Affordable Care Act for four years. Republicans have been trying to end it for a decade. Twice, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional,” he wrote.
Barrett in 2017 wrote a review of a book by law professor Randy Barnett in which she criticized the Supreme Court’s justification for upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” Barrett wrote.
Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, also asserted that Barrett could adversely affect the ACA.
“From day one, President Trump made clear that he had a litmus test for Supreme Court Justices — destroy the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting conditions and overturn our right to make our own health care decisions,” the California Democrat said in her statement.