Looking ahead to a future vacancy on the Supreme Court, President Trump on Friday named five conservative judges to his list of potenti…
Here’s our look at the Trump administration and the rest of Washington.
Looking ahead to a future vacancy on the Supreme Court, President Trump on Friday named five conservative judges to his list of potential nominees to the high court.
They include Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett, 45, who was confirmed two weeks ago to a seat on the U. S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago and D. C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, 52, a White House lawyer for President George W. Bush and a former clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
“The president is refreshing his list,” White House counsel Donald McGahn told an enthusiastic crowd at the Federalist Society convention at the Mayflower Hotel.
Kavanaugh’s name drew a loud response. “He’s winning on the applause meter,” McGahn said.
It was something of surprise that Kavanaugh was left off Trump’s lists last year. He had been seen as a strong candidate for the next Supreme Court vacancy in a Republican administration, particularly if Kennedy were to retire. But legal experts from the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society who helped draft the list chose then not to name any prominent Washington figures.
But last month, Kavanaugh took the side of the Trump administration in a dispute over whether a 17-year-old immigrant held in a refugee center could obtain an abortion. He wrote a 2-1 decision that put her abortion on hold for several days, but he was then overruled by the D. C. Circuit in a 6-3 decision. The young woman then had the abortion.
As for Barrett, the “the dogma lives loudly in her,” McGahn said jokingly. “A prominent Democrat suggested she couldn’t be trusted because she is a practicing Catholic,” he added.
He was referring, if not entirely accurately, to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who questioned Barrett at her Senate hearing over whether she could separate her personal beliefs from her legal duties. Feinstein said at one point the “dogma lives” in her.
Barrett, then a law professor, said she had written that all judges must be able to follow the law and set aside their personal views where there was conflict.
The other new names on Trump’s list were Judge Kevin Newsom, a former Alabama solicitor general who was recently confirmed to the U. S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta; Georgia Supreme Court Justice Britt Grant; and Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Patrick Wyrick.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump pledged to appoint conservative judges and took the unusual step of issuing two lists of his top-10 contenders. The second list included Judge Neil M. Gorsuch of Colorado, who in turn was appointed to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
