The Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court. Lawmakers voted along party lines, with Republican Susan Collins of Maine joining united Democrats to vote against Barrett’s confirmation. Barrett, 48, secured a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the nation’s highest court.
DonaldTrump held a celebratory swearing-in ceremony at the White House later tonight. Weeks ago, a White House event celebrating Barrett’s nomination in the Rose Garden has been linked to a coronavirus outbreak that infectedTrump and several other aides, lawmakers and campaign staff. This time, most attendees wore masks and kept social distance.
Right before the Senate voted on Barrett’s confirmation, the supreme court – short one justice - sided with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots received after election day. In a 5-3 ruling, the justices on Monday refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the 3 November election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.
The US markets closed sharply down, in apparent response to the surge in coronavirus cases and the dwindling chances of a deal being reached on a relief bill before Election Day.
Dr Anthony Fauci said the US is still in its first wave of coronavirus infections, as cases surge in dozens of states. “I look at it more as an elongated — and an exacerbation of — the original first wave,” Fauci told Yahoo Finance today. The US set a single-day record for new cases over the weekend, reporting more than 83,000 cases on Friday.
Joe Biden said Barrett’s “rushed and unprecedented” confirmation “should be a stark reminder to every American that your vote matters.” The former vice president, drew a contrast between his campaign events and the big rallies Trump has been holding, saying he is “not putting on super spreaders.”
My colleague Tom McCarthy will continue to bring you live updates. Follow along with our new blog here:
The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former center-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.
In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonizing and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.
The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to center-right and center-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.
The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.
Biden recently said if he’s elected president, he would appoint a special commission to study the US court system and make recommendations to reform it.
Amid the Republican rush to appoint Barrett ahead of an election they have a good chance of losing up and down the ballot, many Democrats have urged Biden to commit to adding justices to the court to restore balance between liberals and moderates on the bench.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Biden said “there’s a number of alternatives that go well beyond ‘packing’” the court.
“The last thing we need to do is turn the supreme court into just a political football, [that means] whoever has the most votes gets whatever they want,” Biden said. “Presidents come and go. Supreme court justices stay for generations.”
The constitution does not specify how many justices there should be on the supreme court, leaving that to Congress to decide. The number of justices has expanded and contracted several times over the years.
Joe Biden has issued a statement on the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, saying that the “rushed and unprecedented” proceedings “should be a stark reminder to every American that your vote matters.”
The rushed and unprecedented confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as Associate Justice to the Supreme Court, in the middle of an ongoing election, should be a stark reminder to every American that your vote matters. https://t.co/NwEi4jyMd1
Just a few days after Election Day next week, the Supreme Court will hear the case on the Affordable Care Act. While panicked and erratic in mishandling the pandemic, Donald Trump has been crystal clear on one thing — for the past four years, and again just last night on 60 Minutes — he wants to tear down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety and take away your health care and protections for pre-existing conditions.
This goal — the goal of the Republican Party for ten years — was a litmus test in selecting this nominee, regardless of the damage done to the U.S. Senate, to Americans’ faith in the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and to our democracy, and regardless of how the Affordable Care Act has protected hundreds of millions of people before and during the pandemic.
But we will not give up. If you want to protect your health care, if you want your voice to be heard in Washington, if you want to say no, this abuse of power doesn’t represent you — then turn out and vote.
In Philadelphia, protesters took to the streets after police killed Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old Black man.
Police with shields and riot gear attempted to disband a crowd gathered near the police district headquarters. The Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Anna Orso captured a video of officers pushing back at the crowd after some people threw bottles.
with a group of dozens still in west Philly, about a block from precinct. Police with shields pushed back crowds as ppl threw bottles pic.twitter.com/wRMEBUGNri
As my colleague Sam Levine has spotted, justice Brett Kavanaugh’s justification in today’s supreme court ruling that blocked a deadline extension to count absentee ballots in Wisconsin doesn’t totally add up.
Kavanaugh cites Vermont as an example of a state that “decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules” due to the pandemic, even though, in fact, the state authorized the secretary of state to automatically mail a ballot to all registered voters this year, in order to make it easier for everyone to vote absentee.
Mailing every voter a ballot by 10/1 factored into our decision to stick with an election day receipt deadline instead of postmark. We also authorized ballot processing 30 days out. Those are our VT specific solutions, but other states needs are different. Count. Every. Vote.
— Vermont Secretary of State’s Office (@VermontSOS) October 27, 2020
“Mailing every voter a ballot by 10/1 factored into our decision to stick with an election day receipt deadline,” the Vermont secretary of state’s office said.
Amy Coney Barrett’s addition to the court could leave an indelible mark on how fiercely the US, and perhaps the rest of the world, can fight rising temperatures, even as scientists warn society has just years to take serious action.
Barrett, a 48-year-old devout Catholic, has said she does not hold “firm views” on climate change, calling it a “very contentious matter of public debate”. Because her father worked in oil and gas, she has previously recused herself from cases involving Royal Dutch Shell.
From deciding the legality of climate regulations for polluters to determining whether oil companies should pay for climate damages, Barrett and five other conservative justices will wield considerable influence.
While Barrett’s history of decisions on environmental issues is limited, her appointment to the court by Trump – as his third justice in four years – solidifies a transfer of power from an often progressive or moderate court.
“Adding one more conservative justice just gives all the conservative justices more fuel to be more political in what they’re going to do,” said Jean Su, an attorney who directs the energy justice program for the Center for Biological Diversity.
Prominently sidelined, now, is Chief Justice John Roberts, whose institutionalist instincts led him to cast crossover votes to prevent the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, to preserve a program protecting young immigrant arrivals and to uphold, on the grounds of precedent, the basic protections conferred by Roe v Wade.
It is no longer Roberts’ court, analysts say, because the chief justice has been shuffled to the bottom of the conservative deck, which now stacks high enough on the court, with the arrival of Barrett, to dispatch whatever rulings it pleases on issues from environmental regulations to reproductive rights to voting rights.
“She will help to dramatically flip the balance on the court,” said Nan Aron, president of the progressive Alliance for Justice advocacy group, of Barrett. “It will be certain now that the right has captured the federal judiciary, at the supreme court level, and that they are seeking to advance a dangerous agenda.”
Every issue of importance to progressive activists, starting with the basic right of every American to vote and extending to the need for regulations that protect employees from dangerous working conditions and consumers from predatory lenders, is on the chopping block with Barrett on the court, analysts say.
The court has recently issued rulings about the status of immigrants, the protection of LGBTQ+ people under anti-discrimination statutes, the ability of a president to come under criminal investigation, and the right to an abortion that could be overturned or subsumed in a churn of cases tailored by conservative activists to appeal to the new bench lineup.
Amy Coney Barrett is a constitutional ‘originalist’ – but what does it mean?
As the latest conservative judge to declare herself a constitutional “originalist” during confirmation hearings, Barrett could influence what kinds of arguments hold sway on the court for years to come – and what cases the court hears in the first place.
It has been rare over the course of American history for a particular brand of judicial philosophy to gain such prominence that it catches the public eye. A torrent of judicial appointments by Donald Trump over the last four years, however, including three supreme court nominees espousing “originalism”, has pushed the term into the political discourse.
Barrett defined the term for the Senate. “So in English, that means that I interpret the constitution as a law, that I interpret its text as text and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it,” she said. “So that meaning doesn’t change over time. And it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
Aziz Huq, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, said that there is a thriving academic debate about the merits of originalism that is only “loosely connected” with the current political discourse, in which the term is often used on the right as a philosophical fig leaf for a conservative political agenda.
“The political discourse of originalism is closely aligned with the policy preferences of the Republican party that has promoted judges who happen to take this perspective,” Huq said. “It purports to be something that is moving outside politics, but it is – in its origins, and in the way that it has been applied in the courts – it is tightly linked to a particular partisan political orientation.”
Elected officials and others who have noticed that 86% of Trump’s judicial appointees are white and 75% are men have begun to hear something else in the term: a nostalgic appeal to the exclusive hold on power by white men at the time the constitution was written – a sense reinforced by the president’s repeated personal refusal to disavow white supremacy.
Barrett has to take one more oath before she joins the bench on the supreme court.
Justices have to take a constitutional oath and the judicial oath. Having done the former tonight at the White House, she is expected to do the latter at a private ceremony tomorrow.
The Supreme Court says ACB will officially take the Judicial Oath tomorrow (Tues) in a private ceremony at the court. At that time she will officially become an active participant in court proceedings via @devindwyer
