WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump wasted no time after the Republican Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Monday, sweeping her into the role of justice with a swearing-in ceremony at the White House.
The Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Barrett in a partisan vote on a justice seldom seen and reflective of the political tensions roiling Washington. The GOP victory shifts the high court to a 6-3 conservative majority.
“The oath that I have solemnly taken tonight means, at its core, that I will do my job without any fear or favor. And that I will do so independently of both the political branches and of my own preferences,” Barrett said after being sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Her rise to justice marks an unprecedented moment in U.S. history: no Supreme Court nominee has ever been confirmed so close to a presidential election.
With nearly 60 million Americans having voted early thus far in the lead up to next week’s white-knuckle election, Democrats argue the GOP stole from Americans the right to have a say on a justice to replace liberal icon Ruther Bader Ginsburg.
Powerless without the votes to block Trump’s nomination, they were indignant Monday over Republicans confirming Barrett just eight days out from the 2020 election.
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the historic confirmation would go down as one of the darkest days in the 231-year history of the U.S. Senate.
He warned Republican senators that Americans will remember that the GOP installed a justice on the high court while voters were standing in line at the polls.
"I know that you think that this will eventually blow over, but you’re wrong. The American people will never forget this blatant act of bad faith. They will never forget your complete disregard for their voices,” Schumer said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote to confirm Barrett.
But Trump celebrated the judicial victory as a “momentous day for America.”
On the South Lawn of the White House, in a socially distanced event attended by members of his cabinet and GOP senators, the president praised Barrett for her “towering intellect” and noted that she is the first mother of school-aged children to serve on the Supreme Court.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the lead up to the confirmation vote claimed Democrats want “activist judges.”
The left's view that the Founding Fathers “botched the job” when writing the role of the judiciary into the Constitution, he argued on the Senate floor, was at the heart of the political divisiveness on display during Barrett’s confirmation.
“These are not the days when Justice Scalia was confirmed 98 to nothing and Justice Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3,” McConnell said.
Democrats have warned voters that Barrett's poses a threat to the future of health care, abortion rights, equality for LGBTQ Americans and presidential power.
The 48-year-old justice is Trump’s 220th judicial appointee, joining Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, 162 district court judges and two U.S. Court of International Trade judges.
Following her confirmation to the Seventh Circuit in 2017, Barrett was already one of 53 circuit court judges to be enrobed by Trump. Collectively, jurists appointed by Trump and confirmed by a Senate steered by McConnell now make up a quarter of the federal bench.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, had called on Barrett to postpone her swearing in until after American voters choose the next president to “remove any doubt about conflict of interests.”