Democrats will portray President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee as an ideologue, while Republicans will paint her as an accomplished working mother.
The Senate on Monday will dive into an extraordinary week of Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, with Republicans and Democrats offering two starkly divergent portraits of a nominee who would tilt the court decisively to the right. Just 22 days before a bitterly contested election, Republicans who are behind in the polls are racing to confirm Judge Barrett and cement a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the nation’s highest court that would long outlast President Trump’s tenure, even if he were re-elected. In need of a last-ditch campaign reset, they plan to largely eschew the implications of the court’s rightward tilt, instead portraying Judge Barrett as an apolitical and accomplished working mother of seven in an appeal to moderate voters, especially women. Democrats are planning the opposite approach. They will brush past Judge Barrett’s biography and qualifications and focus instead on legal writings that suggest she is an ideologue with a far-right political agenda, arguing that she would overturn the Affordable Care Act, roll back abortion rights and favor Mr. Trump in any election-related legal challenge that might arise from the balloting on Nov.3. The emerging strategies promise to turn four days of nationally televised proceedings into a bruising affair, even by the modern standards of recent bitter Supreme Court confirmation battles. They also reflect a reality that both parties have accepted: With Republicans largely united in her favor, Democrats are powerless to prevent Judge Barrett, an appeals court judge in Chicago and Notre Dame law professor, from ascending to the Supreme Court. The real fight is to influence Election Day. “What the American people need to know right now is the Republican Party is much more interested in putting this person on the court so she can take away health care from millions of people than actually helping them,” said Senator Mazie K. Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii. Democrats’ goal, she added, was for voters to “take that understanding to the polls.” The political implications of the proceeding will be hard to miss. Less than a week after the vice-presidential debate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, the running mate of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic candidate, plans to step off the campaign trail to reclaim her place on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She will appear at the hearings remotely as a pandemic precaution. Four endangered Republicans on the committee, including the chairman, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, will be jockeying for the attention of cable news and voters. “It is energizing voters in Iowa,” Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, one of the vulnerable Republicans, told reporters on Sunday in Sioux City, where she was campaigning at Harley-Davidson stores on a motorcycle trip across the state. “They really do want to see someone that will uphold our Constitution, and that’s the only litmus test I have.
