Senate Democrats are preparing a plan of attack against Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett to focus squarely on issues they believe will resonate with voters while excoriating Republicans for rushing the nomination, an effort designed to avoid a spectacle that could damage their efforts to win back the Senate majority and the White House.
Democrats are cognizant of the political fallout two years ago on some of their vulnerable members from red states after the Senate devolved into the most politically charged battle over a Supreme Court nominee in a generation – the GOP push to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the court – just weeks before the 2018 midterms.
Now with Election Day less than a month away, and with control of the Senate hanging in the balance, Democrats are plotting a careful, methodical case against Barrett – hoping voters will side with them over issues like health care that are central to their minds in the 2020 campaign. The fear, according to Democratic senators and top party strategists, is that Barrett hearing will devolve into an ugly affair that will give Republicans a wedge issue to stave off deep losses at the polls next month.
“I think the Democrats will be very professional,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, the lone Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh in 2018 and survived his reelection in conservative West Virginia that year. “They understand how Brett Kavanaugh went off the rails.”
As part of that effort, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee say they want to steer clear of questions about whether Barrett’s devout Catholic faith will impact her views, an issue that arose during her 2017 confirmation hearings to sit on a federal appeals court and prompted an uproar among Republicans. Instead, Democrats want to center on issues like defending the Affordable Care Act in the midst of a pandemic and their argument that the winner of the November 3 election should select the nominee, a position that polls show clear majorities of voters support.
As they’ve prepared for next week’s confirmation hearings, multiple aides and members say Democrats on the committee have made the decision not to focus on Barrett’s affiliation with People of Praise, a small, multi-denominational Charismatic Christian group that was founded in the 1970s and believes that members should make a “covenant” and “lifelong promise of love and service to fellow community members,” according to its website. While Barrett is Catholic, her affiliation with the group has become the subject of several stories in recent days – all of which Democrats on Capitol Hill have been silent on.
“I don’t intend to question her on her personal views or her private religious views. I don’t expect my colleagues to either,” Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, said Wednesday during a call with reporters when asked if he planned to talk with Barrett about her faith.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another Democrat on the Committee, also said that he believed it would be inappropriate to push Barrett to discuss her religion and the impact it would have on her rulings as a judge.
“I have no intention of asking Amy Coney Barrett about her religious faith or any issues concerning religion,” Blumenthal said. “I believe that questions should be directed to the nominee’s judicial philosophy.”
Whether Democrats stick to that plan remains to be seen. It’s still possible that Democrats could go off script or push Barrett on what role her religious faith might play in her decisions – particularly on abortion-related cases that come before the court.
The Kavanaugh and Barrett proceedings are not the same. Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault – and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, testified under oath about her recollection of a harrowing episode from their high school days. Kavanaugh furiously denied the allegations, and Republicans rallied to his defense before narrowly winning enough votes for his confirmation.
Meantime, Barrett would be the first nominee confirmed after July in a presidential election year – and the proceedings are moving much faster than typical Supreme Court hearings with Republicans eager to get her on the bench ahead of the elections. Moreover, President Donald Trump has said he needs a ninth justice on the court to rule on any election disputes, an issue bound to be a flashpoint during the hearings.
With the explosive confirmation hearings of Kavanaugh a recent memory, Democrats are heading into next week’s hearing with a simple plan: avoid controversy and don’t delve into Barrett’s personal beliefs. Members are looking to focus their arguments on Barrett’s past writings, public comments and judicial record when it comes to workers’ rights, gun rights, abortion and health care.
“She’s a radical. She is seeking a position on the Supreme Court in order to legislate out of existence background checks,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said on a call Thursday.
It was soon after Barrett was nominated that Democrats settled on their strategy to focus on the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders and members of the Judiciary Committee concluded that health care would be the best way to frame the fight over her nomination with the Supreme Court scheduled to hear arguments on an ACA case just the week after the election. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, former Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also had a conversation and agreed on the strategy, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
Republicans are already making clear they won’t stand for any questions about her religious faith.
Indeed, the issue came up during Wednesday night’s debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris, who is Biden’s running mate and also sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“And our hope is, in the hearing next week, unlike Justice Kavanaugh received with treatment from you and others, we hope she gets a fair hearing,” Pence said. “And we particularly hope that we don’t see the kind of attacks on her Christian faith that we saw before. Senator, I know one of our judicial nominees, you actually attacked because they were a member of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, just because the Knights of Columbus holds pro-life views.”
Harris responded by saying that the nominee to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat should be chosen by the winner of the elections, and added: “Joe Biden and I are people of faith. And it’s insulting to suggest we would knock anyone because of their faith.”
Indeed, Democrats see other issues to make their case against her nomination – including abortion rights.
Democrats are expected to push Barrett on why she did not disclose she had signed her name to a 2006 newspaper ad in the South Bend Tribune sponsored by the St. Joseph County Right to Life calling the decision of Roe v. Wade “barbaric.”
One Democratic aide closely involved in the planning for the hearing told CNN that discussions on Barrett’s religion would “distract” and risk putting Democrats on the defensive. Democrats are looking to avoid a repeat of a moment from Barrett’s 2017 confirmation for the 7th Circuit where Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the committee, questioned whether Barrett could separate her religious views from her enforcement of the law.
“I think in your case professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is the dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said. “That’s of concern.”
For their part, Republicans have already been charging that Democrats are imposing a religious test on Barrett as a nominee, pointing to Feinstein’s past comment and those of Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois who asked Barrett in 2017 if she considered herself an orthodox Catholic.
The issue came up in the 2017 hearings because of a 1998 law article she had co-written, which said: “The Catholic Church’s opposition to the death penalty places Catholic judges in a moral and legal bind.” In that hearing, senators in both parties questioned her about the article.
In a recent interview, Durbin defended that line of questioning at the time.
“She raised the issue,” Durbin said, pointing to her law review article. “She was questioned by four different senators: two Democrats, myself included, and two Republicans. What did she mean by this? Ordinarily, you would never raise the question of religion in a hearing,”
But Republicans are ready for Democrats to invoke her faith.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted Wednesday that “the ongoing attacks by Senate Democrats and the media on Judge Barrett’s faith are a disgrace. They demean the confirmation process, disrespect the Constitution, and insult millions of American believers.”
Democrats have been planning for a potential Supreme Court vacancy since May, according to another Democratic aide working closely on the confirmation hearings, with Schumer’s office spending months looking at potential procedural tools that were available to them and consulting with outside consultants on tools available to them to slow down the process. But Democrats recognize there is little they can do to ultimately stop the nomination, unless four Republicans vote against her or if senators can’t return to vote because they’ve been diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Schumer, a New York Democrat, has rejected GOP criticism that Democrats are playing politics with Barrett’s faith, arguing that “no Democrat has attacked Barrett over her faith. It’s a diversion because they don’t want to address the issues including health care and Roe v. Wade.”
But if Democrats do raise concerns about her religious views, they are likely to get backlash from even some in their own party.
In his meeting with Barrett last week, Manchin, himself a practicing Catholic, told her that he hopes no one uses her religious views to question her views.
“And I would chastise anyone who did that,” Manchin told CNN.