WASHINGTON (CN) — Judge Amy Coney Barrett refused to say Wednesday whether voter discrimination exists in America as Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris grilled the Supreme Court nominee about her record.
“These are very charged issues,” Barrett said. “They have been litigated in the courts. So I will not engage on that question.
Picking back up on the heels of Tuesday’s 11-hour session, senators confronted President Donald Trump’s pick to fill the vacancy left by the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg about hot-button issues like abortion, health care, voting rights and the power of the presidency.
Harris, who participated remotely in the Senate Judiciary hearing, had asked Barrett if she agreed with Chief Justice John Robert who wrote in Shelby Co. v. Holder that: "Voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that.”
The Supreme Court in Shelby overturned the requirement in the Voting Rights Act that states with a history of voter discrimination must seek federal preclearance before they can change election procedures.
Adding that she does believe racial discrimination exists in the United States, Barrett said, “I think we’ve seen evidence of that this summer.”
Chairman Lindsey Graham began Wednesday morning by defending Barrett’s take that the landmark abortion law Roe v. Wade is not “super-precedent.”
Barrett previously defined the legal threshold as “cases that are so well settled that no political actors and no people seriously push for their overruling.”
“I'm answering a lot of questions about Roe which I think indicates that Roe doesn’t fall in that category,” she said Tuesday.
Graham bunched Roe with landmark Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United v. FEC, Planned Parenthood v. Casey and District of Columbia v. Heller, saying they all are “actively being litigated.”
Barrett followed up by telling the committee that legal scholars say that Roe not being “super-precedent” does not mean it should be overturned.
Senator Chris Coons also raised Griswold v. Connecticut — a 1965 decision establishing the right to privacy to purchase and use contraception — looking to Barrett to define her own take on the landmark case and distance herself from her mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who argued there is no right to privacy in the Constitution.
Trump’s nominee said it “seems shockingly unlikely” that Griswold would be overturned. But when Barrett declined to opine on Supreme Court precedent, as she had dozens of times since the marathon hearing began Monday, Coons noted that Chief Justice Roberts has said he affirmed the decision, as did Justices Elena Kagan and Clarence Thomas in their confirmation hearings.
Weeks ahead of a presidential election, with millions of early voters already heading to the polls, Senator Dianne Feinstein invoked Scalia's description of the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby, as a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
When Trump nominated Barrett last month, the Seventh Circuit judge said Scalia’s “judicial philosophy is mine, too.”
But Barrett, seeking to distinguish herself from the conservative giant known for his originalist interpretation of the Constitution, said Wednesday morning that her legal perspectives do not wholly align with those of Scalia.
“When I said Justice Scalia’s philosophy is mine, too, what I meant is that his jurisprudential approach to text ... is the same that I would take,” Barrett said. She also told senators the Voting Rights Act was “obviously a triumph for the Civil Rights movement.”
Picking up a question Feinstein had asked Tuesday on whether Trump can unilaterally delay the election under any circumstances, Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, flipped the question to ask if the president can deny the right to vote based on race.