# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
US President Donald Trump will reportedly nominate Amy Coney Barrett, a favourite of social conservatives, to be the new Supreme Court justice.

The president's decision - to be revealed at the White House on Saturday - has been confirmed to the BBC's US partner CBS News and other US media.

She would replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last Friday.

The nomination will touch off a bitter Senate fight to get her confirmed as November's presidential election looms.

CBS - citing several sources involved in or familiar with the selection process - reported that the president had settled on Judge Barrett.

But when asked about his choice on Friday evening, Mr Trump refused to give anything away: "You'll find out tomorrow. Look, they're all great. It could be any one of them."

If Judge Barrett is confirmed, conservative-leaning justices will hold a 6-3 majority on America's highest court for the foreseeable future.

The 48-year-old would be the third justice appointed by this Republican president, after Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

The Supreme Court's nine justices serve lifetime appointments, and their rulings can shape public policy on everything from gun and voting rights to abortion and campaign finance long after the presidents who appoint them leave office.

In recent years, the court has expanded gay marriage to all 50 states, allowed for Mr Trump's travel ban on mainly Muslim countries to be put in place, and delayed a US plan to cut carbon emissions.

Tricky position for Democrats

Amy Coney Barrett has been on Donald Trump's shortlist for Supreme Court vacancies for some time, but the word was that she would be the most appropriate replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As of last week, that was no longer a hypothetical scenario.

Even before Mr Trump reportedly settled on Judge Barrett as his pick, conservatives were rallying around the nominee, whoever it might be. And if they stick together, as all but two seem to be doing, her confirmation appears assured - whether it's before November's election or in a "lame duck" Senate session afterward.

The choice of Judge Barrett puts Democrats in a tricky position. They have to find a way of undermining support for the nominee without seeming to attack her Catholic faith or personal background - moves that could risk turning off some voters in November. They will seek to delay the proceedings as best they can, while keeping their focus on issues like healthcare and abortion, which could be at the centre of future legal battles with Justice Barrett on a conservative-dominated court.

Then they have to hope Judge Barrett, or the Republicans, make some kind of critical error. It's a tall order, but for the moment it's the only play they have.

Who is Amy Coney Barrett?

She is described as a devout Catholic who, according to a 2013 magazine article, said that "life begins at conception". This makes her a favourite among religious conservatives keen to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion nationwide.

Her links to a particularly conservative Christian faith group, People of Praise, have been much discussed in the US press. LGBT groups have pointed out that the group's network of schools have guidelines stating a belief that sexual relations should only happen between heterosexual married couples.

One such group, Human Rights Campaign, has voiced strong opposition to Judge Barrett's confirmation, declaring her an " absolute threat to LGBTQ rights".

She has repeatedly insisted her faith does not compromise her work.

Judge Barrett has also ruled in favour of President Trump's hardline immigration policies and expressed views in favour of expansive gun rights.

Conservatives hope she will help to invalidate Obamacare, the health insurance programme that was introduced by President Trump's democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

Some 20 million Americans could lose their health coverage if the court overturns the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Democrats have rallied support over this issue, but it is thought unlikely that the Supreme Court will rule on the ACA before the 3 November election.

Nominated by Mr Trump to the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Barrett was confirmed by the Senate in a 55-43 vote in October 2017 after a tough process. She was one of the names the president considered to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2017.

After graduating from Notre Dame University Law School in Indiana, she clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. She served as a legal scholar at Notre Dame for around 15 years.

Born in New Orleans, she is married to a former federal prosecutor in South Bend, Indiana, and together they have seven children.

Two of them were adopted from Haiti and their youngest biological child has Down Syndrome.

Battle over Supreme Court

Will Judge Barrett be confirmed?

The White House has begun contacting Republican Senate offices to schedule meetings with the nominee next week, two sources familiar with the planning told CBS.

The courtesy calls are expected to start on Wednesday. The nominee will then be grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee - on which 22 Republicans and Democrats sit.

The hearings usually last between three and five days. Afterwards committee members will vote on whether to send the nomination to the full Senate. If they do, all 100 senators will vote to confirm or reject her.

Republicans hold a slim majority of 53 senators in the chamber, but they already seem to have the 51 votes they need to get Judge Barrett confirmed.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to hold a confirmation vote before the White House election on 3 November.

Barring a surprise, Democrats seem to have few procedural options to prevent her gliding through the Senate to the Supreme Court bench.

Since Ginsburg's death, Republican senators have been accused of hypocrisy for pressing ahead with a Supreme Court nomination during an election year.

In 2016, Mr McConnell refused to hold hearings for Democratic President Barack Obama's nominee for the court, Merrick Garland.

The nomination, which came 237 days before the election, was successfully blocked because Republicans held the Senate and argued the decision should be made outside of an election year.

With 39 days before the 2020 election, Democrats now say the Republicans should stand by their earlier position and let voters decide.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Mr Trump's efforts to appoint a justice were an "abuse of power".

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion survey conducted after Ginsburg's death found that 62% of US adults thought the vacancy should be filled by the presidential election winner, while 23% disagreed and the rest said they were not sure.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amy Coney Barrett 'to be picked by Trump for Supreme Court'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
US President Donald Trump will reportedly nominate Amy Coney Barrett, a favourite of social conservatives, to be the new Supreme Court justice. The president's decision - to be revealed at the White House on Saturday - has been confirmed to the BBC's US partner CBS News and other US media.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I was watching the president of the United States suggest to a mostly maskless crowd that a Democratic congresswoman had married her brother when the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. The shock of her death sledgehammered a country teetering on an ugly and desperate edge. It came in waves. It wasn't merely the loss to the country, or the sadness that a champion of equal rights had died. Nor was it the fact that an increasingly corrupt Republican Party is very close to forcing through the judicial supermajority it needs in order to lock in minority rule and overturn American women's right to reproductive choice. (You will no doubt hear often in the coming weeks that, of the five conservative Supreme Court justices, four were nominated by presidents who had lost the popular vote.) There was a flashback to the contempt and grief Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing aroused in so many appalled onlookers. And then there was the dread of realizing that a citizenry breaking-financially, politically, even cognitively -under five different kinds of instability was going to have to endure more. We have been in a bad way for a long time, but this is the hurricane on top of the wildfire that follows the earthquake.

What's enraging is that we shouldn't be here. We have institutions and norms and precedents, so what should happen next is almost absurdly plain. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made his thinking on the subject quite clear back in 2016, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, nine months before the election. "The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice," he said. "Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president." There shouldn't have been any mystery about what Mitch McConnell-of all people-would do when a Supreme Court vacancy opened up six weeks (rather than nine months) before Election Day of 2020.

And there wasn't. Shortly after Ginsburg's death was announced, McConnell declared his intentions: Trump's nominee would receive a vote in the Senate, and though he left the timing slightly unclear, he has no intention of letting the will of the American people (who have already started voting) determine what should happen. He made quick work of the optimists on Twitter suggesting that he surely wouldn't be so hellbent on total power that he'd risk destroying the country by breaking the precedent he himself had articulated. Wrong. He would. And anyone who took him at his word when he rejected Merrick Garland's nomination was made a fool when he reversed himself on the question of whether (to quote the man himself) "the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice."

I want to pause here to note, humbly, that it is wounding to watch a public servant reduce those who take him at his word to fools. I mention that not because it "matters" in any sense McConnell would recognize but because it is simply true that this nation's decline accelerates when the conventional wisdom becomes that believing what the Senate Majority Leader says is self-evidently foolish. The chestnut that politicians always lie is overstated-a society depends on some degree of mutual trust. One party has embraced nihilism, pilloried trust, and turned good faith into a sucker's failing in a sucker's game.

Many of us are coping with that lacerating redefinition by knowingly rolling our eyes. Ginsburg's death hurts, but more than one strain of political grief is operative. This is why so many political reactions at present seem to orbit around the question of whether an unwanted outcome was unexpected. "And you're surprised?" is a frequent response to some new instance of Trumpian corruption. This brand of cynicism has spread, quite understandably: It's an outlook that provides some cognitive shelter in a situation that-having historically been at least somewhat rule-bound-has one side shredding the rules and cheering at how much they're winning. Folks who at one point gave Republican declarations of principle the benefit of the doubt (I include myself) feel like chumps now. Conversely, the cynical prognosticators who used to seem crabbed and paranoid just keep getting proven right. Whatever the worst thing you imagine McConnell doing might be, he can usually trump it.

Just by way of example: A former White House official told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer for a piece in April that McConnell reassured donors that he would install a Supreme Court justice for Trump regardless of how close to the election Ginsburg's death might be. He apparently referred to the prospect of replacing Ginsburg in the event of her death as "our October surprise." In 2019, McConnell gleefully tweeted a photo of some tombstones, one of which had Merrick Garland's name on it-hours after a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which 23 people died. He has said that stopping Garland's nomination is the proudest moment of his career. It's uniquely painful that this is the person architecting Ginsburg's replacement in violation of his own contemptible theories.

I am not saying anything new here. But what I am interested in, because I think it must be understood, and because the stakes of it have never been higher, is what McConnellizing does, affectively, to so many American citizens. What it feels like, in other words. We are overdue for a real reckoning with what it means to be degraded by our own leadership. And make no mistake: It is degrading when people lie to you openly and obviously. Leaving the polity aside for a moment, it's the kind of emotion we humans aren't great at coping with. Sometimes we react by snorting at anyone who expects any better (that is again the " you're surprised?" cynicism). But if you can't cover it with cynicism, it simply hurts.

Shall we experience being degraded together? Here is the justification McConnell offered, shortly after Ginsburg died, for violating his own rule:

In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia's death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president's second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president's Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.

This last sentence-which you will recognize as the heart of McConnell's argument-is a lie. But before I supply the dull fact proving that it is a lie, I'd like us to pause and notice the extent to which whatever I am about to say will not factor into how you feel reading the above. Whatever I say, it will not provide you relief for me to demonstrate that this tortured reasoning McConnell supplied is horseshit. You are already meant to understand it as horseshit. That's the insult. That's where one part of what I guess we could call patriotic pain comes from.

OK, now for the dull facts: What McConnell says in that statement is not true. In 1988 (an election year!), the Democratically controlled Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy-President Ronald Reagan's nominee to the Supreme Court. McConnell tried to circumvent this reality by crafting his new rule to exclude any vacancy " that arose " in an election year (Lewis Powell retired in late 1987).

Does an exercise like this leave us anywhere? I think it might. I think we have a habit of misnaming political experiences in ways that help us metabolize loss. I think, for example, that we have a bad habit of calling McConnell's double standard-which will be devastating to a country already struggling through various legitimacy crises-"hypocrisy." And sure, step onto Twitter after Lindsey Graham also unabashedly went back on his own word and you'll see many a person rolling their eyes at anyone pointing out that Republicans are hypocrites, as if it matters. One can sympathize with the eye-rollers-of course hypocrisy doesn't matter. But that's mostly because hypocrisy isn't the word for what this is. Hypocrisy is a mild failing. It applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to for their own good; it does not apply to parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance money while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true.

When Ginsburg died, those whose rights she championed were caught in a cruel double bind. Raging against the indecent replacement effort feels wrong, because raging before it happens can feel like implicitly conceding. Treating the matter dispassionately, on the other hand, sensibly pointing out that McConnell has stated clearly what should happen, means granting him a good-faith reading he does not deserve. Thanks to the swiftness with which he declared his intentions, we are no longer under any obligation to attempt the latter. All that remains is to let honest anger do what it must.

1. I Don't Want Joe Biden to "Unite" America

2. Trump's Rallies Are a Study in Self-Destruction

3. How Fox News Is Terrifying Its Viewers About Postelection Violence

4. Local Officials Thought Their Elections Were Threatened by a Pandemic. Actually, It Was Something Worse.

It will not help to call the leadership we have right now hypocrites; they will not care, and I doubt the charge will motivate the people who need to be motivated much. But insofar as our own reactions are concerned-and while we think about how to counter an obvious and ugly attempt to steal the Supreme Court seat of a feminist champion of equal rights even as Americans have already started voting-it may help to register the lies they tell you as the calculated insults to your intelligence and to your citizenship and to your country that they are. Fully witnessing and registering insults and degradation is more painful than sneering that you aren't surprised. But I'll be blunt: People are more willing to fight people who insult and degrade them than they are to fight mere "hypocrites."

We deserve better than this. I confess I had no personal feelings about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing; my admiration and gratitude were purely professional and civic. But I found this quote-a response to Irin Carmon asking her how she'd like to be remembered-deeply moving: "Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has."
This post has been updated since publication. For more of Slate's coverage of the response to Justice Ginsburg's passing, subscribe to What Next on Apple Podcasts or listen below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I was watching the president of the United States suggest to a mostly maskless crowd that a Democratic congresswoman had married her brother when the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. The shock of her death sledgehammered a country teetering on an ugly and desperate edge.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Republicans have four excellent reasons to move as quickly as possible to confirm a new associate justice to the Supreme Court.

First, the upcoming election will likely be close, and could well be contested. The Supreme Court may ultimately determine the outcome, and the GOP needs to seat an additional (conservative) justice to guarantee the court is not deadlocked in the event of a dispute.

Second, the fight over filling Ruth Bader Ginsberg 's seat will energize Democrat voters, which Joe Biden's campaign has failed to do. Republicans need to counter this surge of enthusiasm by showing their commitment to conservatives who have historically ranked Supreme Court appointments one of their top priorities.
REP. ANDY BIGGS: TRUMP, NOMINATE RBG REPLACEMENT NOW - HERE'S WHY IT'S SO IMPORTANT
Third, as progressives take control of the Democrat Party, a court dedicated to upholding our Constitution becomes ever more important. Nothing will better protect religious freedom, our freedom of speech or our Second Amendment rights, among many other freedoms, than a conservative court.

Fourth, it's payback time. Democrats' heinous and unforgivable attacks on Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh can best be answered by confirming another conservative jurist.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER
Make no mistake. This battle is going to get ugly; just how ugly became clear almost immediately.

The ink had barely dried on Ginsberg's death certificate before Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tweeted, "this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president."

It should be noted that Schumer sent that tweet even before offering his condolences to Ginsberg's family or paying his respects to the esteemed associate justice.

Schumer set the table for what is already becoming a veritable orgy of bare-knuckle politics. Democrats are calling Republicans hypocrites for vowing to fill Ginsberg's seat before the election. They are reminding voters that, in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., refused to give President Obama's pick Merrick Garland a vote in the Senate; the GOP-led chamber argued then that voters in the upcoming election should decide who best to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia.

Democrats now say that moving ahead with a nomination overturns that precedent; Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., among others, are vowing that, if Republicans manage to secure a conservative majority by confirming a new justice, and Joe Biden is elected president, they will pack the Supreme Court.

Let us be clear: Republicans owe Democrats nothing. No courtesy, no respect, no accommodation. If the GOP can ensure a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years to come, they should move as quickly as possible to do just that.

For four years, Democrats have obstructed and undermined President Trump at every turn. They have continually challenged the legitimacy of this duly elected president, resorted to arcane maneuvers to prevent the White House from filling even non-controversial appointments, engaged the administration in endless litigation, and dragged the country through an extended, costly and ultimately fruitless investigation into the supposed ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Not content with tying the nation in knots over Russia-gate, House Democrats then impeached the president on even more spurious charges. This overreach cost Democrats voter support and raised the president's approval ratings to a record high, for good reason.

Let us be clear: Republicans owe Democrats nothing. No courtesy, no respect, no accommodation.

But nothing was more despicable that the accusations of sexual assault leveled against Brett Kavanaugh, a judge with a spotless reputation and impeccable credentials whom Trump nominated to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.

The spectacle of Sens. Cory "Spartacus" Booker, Kamala Harris and others destroying the reputation of Kavanaugh, based on completely uncorroborated testimony regarding activities decades in the past, the searching through the nominee's high school yearbook for clues, the description of a fine man as a "gang rapist" and the willingness of the media to promote even the most heinous allegations with no proof whatsoever... we remember.

During that appalling show trial, Democrats ceded all decency. They do not deserve any consultation whatsoever in naming the next Supreme Court justice.

Republicans not only should proceed as quickly as possible with a nomination to fill Ginsberg's seat; they must do so. Given the increased use of mail-in ballots and recent rulings that might make such voting untrustworthy, there is every chance the Supreme Court will be called upon to officiate the results.

In the event of a dispute, the worst possible outcome would be a tie vote, which would leave our bitterly divided nation adrift. That is unacceptable.

Anticipating some such showdown may be one reason that Democrat voters have recently ranked choosing Supreme Court justices as a high priority. In a recent Pew poll, some 66% of Democrats described the issue as important to their vote, compared to 61% of Republicans.

Evidence of that interest showed up in the hours after Ginsberg's passing when Democrat causes raked in unprecedented amounts of campaign contributions.

Biden, struggling with a noticeable dearth of enthusiasm for his candidacy, should be elated. Finally, Democrats are excited to vote.

Republicans should be alarmed that the Supreme Court battle could raise Democrat turnout. It also could overshadow rising concern about surging crime that gave President Trump an opening with suburban women voters. Democrats will (again and falsely) warn that another conservative on the court will lead to overturning Roe v. Wade. The best way to curb the Left's energy on the issue is to confirm a new justice before the election.

Moving quickly to fill Ginsberg's seat might also help the GOP keep control of the Senate, by spotlighting the importance of maintaining their majority. Several incumbent Republican senators fighting to keep their seats have endorsed moving ahead to fill Ginsberg's seat, including Lindsey Graham (S.C.),  Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Martha McSally  (Ariz.).
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Let Democrats howl. American voters intelligently put Republicans in control of the Senate; they have yet another chance to protect our Constitution from persistent undermining from the Left. They must take it.

Former President Barack Obama famously said, "Elections have consequences." Indeed they do.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM LIZ PEEK

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Liz Peek: Confirm Supreme Court justice now - 4 reasons why Trump, Republicans should act quickly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Republicans have four excellent reasons to move as quickly as possible to confirm a new associate justice to the Supreme Court. First, the upcoming election will likely be close, and could well be contested.