As an appellate judge in Washington, President Trump’s Supreme Court pick is known for ruling against regulators he sees as having overstepped their bounds
His dozen years on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have been marked with dozens of votes to roll back rules and regulations. He has often concluded that agencies stretched their power too far and frequently found himself at odds with the Obama administration, including in dissents he wrote opposing net-neutrality rules and greenhouse-gas restrictions.
.. When a divided Supreme Court in 2015 rejected the Obama administration’s rules requiring power plants to cut mercury emissions and other pollutants, the majority opinion by conservative justices drew heavily from Judge Kavanaugh... The high court cited his earlier dissent when he argued that the Environmental Protection Agency had failed to consider the costs of its regulations before moving forward. The EPA, he concluded, had ignored a requirement in the Clear Air Act that the agency determine whether an electric-utility regulation is “appropriate” before imposing it.
.. Too often, he found, judges were giving agency regulators the benefit of the doubt based on a doctrine that instructs judges to give more deference when the meaning of what Congress wrote isn’t precisely clear.That was the case, he thought, when the D.C. Circuit last year reviewed the legality of net-neutrality rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission.In a dissenting opinion, he said the FCC didn’t have the authority to classify internet providers as “telecommunications services” and ban them from splitting internet traffic into fast and slow lanes.
Amy Barrett for the Supreme Court
her membership in an organization called People of Praise. This body, which is not affiliated with the Church or any Protestant denomination, is devoted to so-called “charismatic” spirituality: guitar hymns and a somewhat gushy attitude towards prayer. Nothing could be further removed from the high-and-dry devotional lives of actual traditionalist Catholics, whose responses to the charismatic movement since its inception have tended to range from “Not my cup of tea, thanks!” to accusations of heresy.
.. I fully expect that sooner or later a court of which Barrett were a member would overturn Roe v. Wade. That a woman should be responsible for undoing this legally sanctioned perversion of the most wholesome relationship in nature, that between a mother and her child, seems to me right in a way that is almost ineffable.
.. she asked the absolute sharpest, most penetrating questions. She is scary smart.”
.. Barrett should be nominated by the president and confirmed for the very simple reason that she is a gifted legal mind respected by her colleagues and a person of outstanding character whose presence on our country’s highest court would do credit to the United States and her people.
Kennedy’s Replacement Should Be Judge Amy Coney Barrett
It will be nice to have one woman in the majority when the Supreme Court finally overturns Roe v. Wade.
.. She is the youngest of the five top choices, which is a mark in her favor given that the nominee will have life tenure and Trump will want one who will leave a lasting mark on the law.
.. Her educational history — she went to Rhodes College and Notre Dame Law School — would add a little welcome diversity to a Supreme Court full of Yale and Harvard alumni... Barrett has also recently been through Senate confirmation to a federal appeals court. She won the support of all the Republicans and three Democrats.. But they will be hard-pressed to argue that she is an extremist given their own recent support... “Dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said, in reference to Barrett’s Catholic faith. Never mind that Barrett had already said that “it is never appropriate for a judge to apply their personal convictions, whether it derives from faith or personal conviction.”.. Feinstein’s office defended the senator by noting that Barrett had also written, in an article for the Notre Dame Alumni Association, that all people play a role “in God’s ever-unfolding plan to redeem the world” — which is a fairly basic statement of Christian belief that does not imply support for the judicial imposition of theocracy.
.. opposing a woman will probably be more awkward for senators than opposing a man would be. Also, it cannot be good for conservatism that all three women now on the court are liberals.
.. If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned — as I certainly hope it will be, as it is an unjust decision with no plausible basis in the Constitution — it would be better if it were not done by only male justices, with every female justice in dissent.
So pick Barrett, Mr. President. Let the dogma live loudly on the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Temptation of Amy Coney Barrett
And Republicans expect — and want — liberals to be so freaked out by thisthat they oppose her in a manner that can be branded anti-religious. They’re setting her up to be a Christian martyr, minus the grisly end, and daring Democrats to take the bait.
.. Aaron Blake sagely sized up the appeal of this dynamic to Trump, writing that it’s “exactly the kind of battle he generally relishes: One that invites his opponents to overreach.” My Times colleague Ross Douthat tweeted that if Trump wants to “trigger the libs,” he’ll nominate Barrett. Douthat further predicted that her nomination “might bring on the culture-war apocalypse.”
.. She’s the most tactically fascinating of the front-runners in several ways. At 46, she’s the youngest, so her time on the court could easily cover four decades. She’s a longtime resident of Indiana, which happens to be home to Joe Donnelly, one of three Democratic senators whose votes are most clearly in play when it comes to confirming Trump’s nominee.
.. She’d be the only justice on the Supreme Court without the imprimatur of the Ivy League, and there’s little whiff of the coastal elites about her. She did her undergraduate work at Rhodes College in Tennessee and then attended law school at Notre Dame
.. her own time on the bench is limited to her eight months on that court.
.. her promoters revel openly in the idea of Roe v. Wade being overturned after the addition of another woman to a Supreme Court that would then have an almost even gender balance of four women and five men.
.. her Senate confirmation hearings after her nomination for the circuit court made her a hero to conservatives, especially religious ones. They took issue in particular with questions that Senator Dianne Feinstein
.. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said