RBG’s Possible Replacement: Amy Coney Barrett

Soon after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on Sept. 18, President Trump announced his nomination, Amy Coney Barrett on Sept. 26. 

Amy Coney Barrett is a lawyer and former law professor at Notre Dame Law School who currently serves as a circuit judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She was nominated to her current position by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate in Oct. 2017. 

Coney Barrett lives in South Bend, Indiana, and is the mother of seven children. She is Roman Catholic and her family is part of a small Christian parachurch community called People of Praise.

In 2015, she signed a letter stating that the church’s teachings on abortion are that there is “value of human life from conception to natural death” and on marriage and family are “founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman.”

She has been called a “female Antonin Scalia,” for whom she worked as a law clerk in the late nineties. Coney Barrett and her conservative views have been lauded by Republicans, making her quite popular at the party. She’s considered by many to be a textualist in regards to the constitution, meaning that she is someone who believes in applying the original logic and intentions of the Constitution’s framers to a situation.

Her rulings and published papers indicate that she does not support abortion rights. In a dissenting opinion, Coney Barrett expressed that a law in Wisconsin which prohibited convicted felons from owning a gun to be unconstitutional. Many conservatives view any restrictions on guns to be unconstitutional as it is stated by the second amendment that citizens are allowed to bear arms. 

There are many reasons why Coney Barrett may have been picked: her experience, her views, her gender, her background, but the most important is probably her age. At 48, she could plausibly sit on the Supreme Court for over thirty years giving conservatives a secure vote for a long time.