Trump nominates Amy Coney Barrett to supreme court – as it happened

Lisa Murkowski has broken rank with Senate Republicans by saying she does not agree with Donald Trump’s decision to nominate a supreme court justice so close to the election (although she did not say whether she feels the same about Trump nominating after the election if he loses). On Saturday, she said she still intends to meet with Trump’s nomination, Amy Coney Barrett.

“For weeks I have stated that I do not support taking up a potential Supreme Court vacancy this close to an election,” said the Alaska senator in a statement. “But today the President exercised his constitutional authority to nominate an individual to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I welcome the opportunity to meet with the Supreme Court nominee, just as I did in 2016.”

Ed Helmore has written a profile of Amy Coney Barrett for us, and looks at the role religion plays in her personal life and career:

The mother of seven – who adopted two children from Haiti – said she admired justice Elena Kagan, an Obama-appointed abortion rights supporter, for bringing “the knowledge and skill she acquired as an academic to the practical resolution of disputes”.

But during her confirmation hearing, Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein memorably said Barrett had “a long history of believing that your religious beliefs should prevail” and added: “The dogma lives loudly in you.”

Barrett has said she is a “faithful Catholic” but her religious beliefs do not “bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge”. She has also said legal careers ought not to be seen as means of gaining satisfaction, prestige or money, but rather “as a means to the end of serving God”.

Read the full article below:

The Judicial Crisis Network, which focuses on helping confirm conservative judges, says it will spend at least $10m on advertising to support Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the supreme court.

In a statement, the organization said any opposition to Barrett was down to “leftwing extremists”.

“Justice Ginsburg was confirmed in 42 days, Justice O’Connor in 33, and both confirmations were nearly unanimous,” Carrie Severino, president of Judicial Crisis Network, said in a statement. “But Democrats won’t be able to bring themselves to support Judge Barrett because they are beholden to leftwing extremists who want to pack the Supreme Court and defund the police while our cities burn.”

The difference between Barrett’s likely confirmation and those of Ginsburg and O’Connor is that the latter two were not appointed a matter of days before a presidential election.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has noted the vast difference between Amy Coney Barrett and the woman she is likely to succeed on the supreme court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“The differences for reproductive freedom, for health care, for gun control – or the absence thereof – affirmative action, so many issues, her views are going to be diametrically opposed to Ruth Ginsburg’s,” he said on CNN. “And that’s what Donald Trump promised during the campaign. He is delivering on that promise, and we’re going to see in very short order whether the voters think that’s a good idea.”

Amy Coney Barrett’s opposition to abortion and support for gun rights has been remarked upon. Less discussed is her view on climate change. Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, sees Trump’s nominee as a threat to progress on fighting the climate crisis:

“Judge Barrett is an ideological fanatic who lacks the temperament to rule fairly in the interests of all Americans,” he said.

“Her slim judicial record shows that she’s hostile to the environment and will slam shut the courthouse doors to public interest advocates, to the delight of corporate polluters. Environmental justice, our climate and wildlife on the brink of extinction will all suffer if Barrett is confirmed.”

Going back to Barrett’s statements at her nomination announcement, she said she intended to follow the example of Antonin Scalia, the conservative supreme court justice who died in 2016 and for whom she worked as a law clerk.

“His judicial philosophy is mine, too,” she said. “A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they may hold.”

The Democrats appear to be attacking Barrett’s nomination as a threat to healthcare. Following Joe Biden’s earlier statement on Barrett and the Affordable Care Act, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has given his own views:

“The American people should make no mistake — a vote by any Senator for Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act and eliminate protections for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions,” Schumer wrote in a statement.

“As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage, unabated by this Administration, healthcare was already the number one issue on the ballot in November. President Trump has promised to nominate Supreme Court Justices who will “terminate” our health care law and decimate the health care system for American Indians and Alaska Natives. In Judge Barrett, President Trump has found the deciding vote.”

In a 2017 essay, Barrett wrote of her opposition to Chief Justice John Roberts’ actions when he saved the Affordable Care Act in 2012.

“Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” Barrett wrote. “He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power.”

A quick glance at the guest list for Amy Comey Barrett’s nomination ceremony today makes troubling reading. Among the guests were representatives from Judicial Watch, which has described climate science as a “fraud”; the Heritage Foundation, which has also pushed back against climate science; and the Family Research Council, which has opposed abortion rights, divorce and LGBT rights.

Barrett speaks now. She says she is “deeply honoured”. She says she loves the “United States and the United States constitution”.

She says she is “mindful of who came before me”. She says Ruth Bader Ginsburg led “a great American life” and “she smashed glass ceilings”. She talks about Ginsburg’s friendship with conservative justice Antonin Scalia and pledges to build bridges with those whose views she differs from when she is on the court.

She says “a judge must apply the law as written”, setting aside personal views.

She then pays tribute to her husband and children.

Trump thanks members of the senate for their commitment to ensuring a “fair and timely” confirmation of Barrett’s place on the supreme court. He urges Democrats and the press not to question Barrett on personal grounds, no doubt a reference to the difficulties his last nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, encountered.

Trump goes through Barrett’s credentials. He points out she was a law clerk for Antonin Scalia, the conservative supreme court justice who died in 2016, early in her career. Scalia’s wife, Maureen, is in attendance and Trump points her out.

Trump says she was “beloved” by her students as a professor at Notre Dame. He says Democratic as well as Republican colleagues admired her “remarkable” intellect.

Amy Coney Barrett has entered the Rose Garden with Donald Trump, and her seven children. A slight clue for who the president will pick to nominate as the next supreme court justice.

There’s a full crowd in the White House’s Rose Garden for Donald Trump’s announcement but the president has not emerged at the scheduled 5pm start time of the press conference. Not like the president to grandstand. Filling the supreme court with conservative justices was one of Donald Trump’s aims as president, and he will savour this moment.

We’re only minutes away from Trump’s press conference now. There has been discussion of Amy Coney Barrett’s membership of the secretive Catholic group People of Praise. Stephanie Kirchgaessner has looked in the organization, which has some worrying features:

Writing for Politico, Massimo Faggioli, a historian and theologian at Villanova University, said there were “tensions” between serving as a supreme court justice, one of the final interpreters of the US constitution, and swearing an oath to an organization he said “lacks transparency and visible structures of authority that are accountable to their members, to the Roman Catholic church, and to the wider public”.

“A lot of what goes on in People of Praise is not that different than what goes on in a lot of rightwing or conservative Catholic circles,” said Heidi Schlumpf, a national correspondent for National Catholic Reporter, which reports on the church.

“Whether People of Praise rises to the level of cult, I am not in a position to make that judgment. But there is a level of secrecy that was concerning, and there was a level of reports by people who left the organization of authoritarianism that [is] concerning as well.”

You can read the full article below:

As we approach Donald Trump’s press conference, in which he will almost certainly nominate Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the supreme court, it’s worth reading my colleague Ed Pilkington’s report. He says the supreme court battle underscores how rigid partisanship overtook “the world’s greatest deliberative body” – which has never truly represented the majority view.

In 2012, the political scientist Ross Baker spent a sabbatical brushing up on his congressional knowledge by spending time in the office of Harry Reid, the then Democratic majority leader in the US Senate. Baker vividly remembers Reid telling him a story about Mitch McConnell, his opposite number in the Republican party.

“Reid told me he couldn’t get McConnell to go to the White House with him,” Baker recalled. “McConnell would say, ‘I don’t want to go to that place.’ Reid specifically told me, ‘Mitch hates to go there.’”

For Baker, the distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University, that exchange about McConnell’s resistance to even visiting Barack Obama in the White House provided a telling insight into how rigid in its partisanship the modern Republican party under his leadership had become. It resonated with McConnell’s comment two years previously, that “the single most important thing we have to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”.

Such a visceral determination to oust a sitting president was not in the spirit of the Senate as it had historically been conceived. The world’s “greatest deliberative body”, as the now fraying cliché goes, was meant to rise above party political point-scoring.

“The Senate was once the place where problems got solved, where senators were able to converse across party lines,” Baker told the Guardian. “It was the place for the grown-ups. They thought of themselves as special. Well, they’re not special any more.”

Just how far from special the US Senate has become has been exposed this week in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. McConnell lost no time in pressing ahead with a ruthless overturning of a precedent that he himself had invented in 2016.

You can read the full report below:

Florida, which was hit hard by Covid-19 this summer and is still seeing more than 100 deaths from the virus on some days, is reopening slowly after governor Ron DeSantis announced the immediate opening of restaurants and other businesses at 100% capacity and the prohibition of fines against people who refuse to wear face masks.

Not all Floridians are happy with the ruling including his fellow Republican Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami. “I think it’s going to have a huge impact. You know, I just don’t know how many people are actually going to do it now,” he told CNN.

Suarez added: “We’ll see in the next couple of weeks whether he’s right about his perspective. But if he’s wrong about his perspective … it’s going to be very, very, very difficult for him and it’s going to be a very difficult time, because it’s in the middle of flu season.”

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has attracted the ire of Democrats for his attempts to push through a conservative nominee to the supreme court before the election.

Demonstrators went to his house in Washington DC today, painting a mural on his street that reads “Hey Mitch. We Call BS. Let The People Decide.”

Demand Justice, an organization that campaigns to balance the courts and March For Our Lives, which advocates for gun safety, were behind the protest. Donald Trump’s likely pick for the supreme court, Amy Coney Barrett, is a conservative who is a proponent for gun rights. Both organizations oppose nominating a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg during a time when many Americans have already cast their votes in the presidential election.

“We’re outside of Mitch McConnell‘s house because he has the power to listen to the will of American people and fulfill RBG’s dying wish, just as he has had the power to bring bi-partisan house-passed common sense legislation to a vote. Unfortunately he has proven time and time again that he is beholden to the gun lobby and special interests over the desires of his constituents in KY and the American people,” Eve Levenson, the policy and government affair manager for March For Our Lives told CNN.

The presidential election takes place on 3 November, but there is plenty of time to appoint Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court by then.

CNN has reported on the likely timetable for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing schedule for Barrett. The hearing would open on 12 October with two rounds of questions from members of the Senate on the 13th and 14th, before a closed hearing with outside witnesses on 15 October. That would allow a vote to occur on 29 October, in time for the election.

It is likely that the Republican-held Senate would approve Barrett’s nomination, even though a small number of GOP senators are wavering. At the age of 48, Barrett could serve on the court for decades as the US, unlike other countries, does not have a mandatory retirement date for supreme court justices.

Edward Helmore has news of a rise in cases of Covid-19 in some neighbourhoods of New York City:

Senior members of New York’s Orthodox Jewish community are hitting back after city officials attempted to address a rise in coronavirus cases.

Last week, the New York City Health Department threatened to shutter non-essential businesses in neighborhoods with large Orthodox communities in south Brooklyn that have been identified as leading a surge in Covid-19 cases called the “Ocean Parkway Cluster”.

In recent weeks, 4.71% of tests performed in the neighborhoods of Midwood, Borough Park and Bensonhurst have come back positive for Covid-19. The city’s overall positivity rate has hovered around 1% for more than two months.

On Friday, radio host and community activist Heshy Tischler disrupted a Covid-19 awareness meeting being held by New York city health commissioner David Chokshi, calling officials liars and comparing them to Nazis.

“He’s lying! When a man lies, he has to be interrupted! You are a liar,” Tischler yelled, while refusing to wear a mask or keep six feet away from attendees. “Your reports are lies. You are lying and I won’t allow lies to be given out.”

A day earlier, the city’s health department issued a warning that it would close non-essential businesses if infection rates did not start to fall. Officials have pleaded with members of the Orthodox community to observe social distancing guidelines, and said the city will distribute masks, gloves and hand sanitizer.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio also noted the increase of cases in those neighborhoods. “It’s something we have to address with a very aggressive public health effort right away,” he said.

The issue is not new. At the start of the pandemic, state officials called on Orthodox Jewish leaders in New York City and suburban neighborhoods, including Spring Valley and Monsey, which is 35% Orthodox, to take the safety measures seriously.

The city does not break cases down by religion, but the area has a significant Orthodox Jewish population. Officials have previously criticized the community for holding funerals and religious events without apparent regard for social distancing measures.

Last month, De Blasio attributed 16 new cases in Borough Park to a large wedding. The mayor, along with other political leaders, has stopped short from explicitly mentioning Orthodox communities after De Blasio singled them out during a large funeral gathering in Williamsburg and received pushback from rabbinical leaders.

Vox is out with a fascinating and very worthwhile piece about reports which have mistakenly said People of Praise, the Catholic group to which probable supreme court pick Amy Coney Barrett belongs, helped inspire Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

One of the weirder ways this debate has played out since Barrett was first discussed as a potential nominee is the fight over whether or not People of Praise … is also one of the inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel (and its recent TV adaptation), fertile women are forced to live as childbearing slaves called handmaids. The book isn’t an established inspiration – but the story has developed legs anyway.

The inaccurate link between the People of Praise and Atwood’s story, perpetuated by a series of confusing coincidences and uneven fact-checking, first emerged in a Newsweek article and was later picked up by Reuters. Both articles have since been corrected, but the right was furious at both.

The Washington Examiner called it a “smear that just won’t die.” Fox News noted several other outlets have mentioned Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale in the same story.

Stephanie Kirchgaessner’s story for the Guardian on People of Praise does not make the erroneous link. It’s here:

Health officials in Florida reported at least 2,795 new cases of Covid-19 and at least 107 deaths on Saturday, according to the state’s department of health.

The state has reported at least 698,682 coronavirus cases and 14,022 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to the department.

Authorities said Florida’s overall positivity rate for all tests was 13.35% on Friday, which is above the 10% threshold that health officials say is necessary before scaling back local precautions. The World Health Organization advises societies can reopen when they can keep their overall positivity rate at 5% or below.

On Friday, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the state would move to phase three of reopening, which includes the immediate opening restaurants and other businesses at 100% capacity and the prohibition of local fines against people who refuse to wear face masks.

A photo essay by Lexey Swall captures the scenes of mourning in Washington this week following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said the US state department “owes an apology” to a Finnish journalist who saw the International Women of Courage Award, bestowed in part for her work on Russia, taken away because she criticized Donald Trump on social media.

Jessikka Aro, an investigative reporter for Finland’s public service broadcaster Ylewas, was due to receive the award in March 2019. Rescinding it, the state department insisted she had not been a finalist and blamed the confusion on a “regrettable error”.

“Secretary [of state Mike] Pompeo should have honored a courageous journalist willing to stand up to Kremlin propaganda,” Menendez said. “Instead, his department sought to stifle dissent to avoid upsetting a president who, day after day, tries to take pages out of [Vladimir] Putin’s playbook. The state department owes Ms Aro an apology.”

But Foreign Policy magazine reported that Aro was punished “after US officials went through [her] social media posts and found she had also frequently criticized President Donald Trump”.

There were 55,054 new coronavirus cases and 952 more deaths reported across the United States on Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tally.

The highest single-day reporting of new cases since 14 August lifts the overall totals to at least 7,032,712 infections and 203,750 deaths.

The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as well as repatriated cases.

More than 1,000 New Yorkers tested positive for Covid-19 on Friday – the first time since 5 June the state has seen a daily caseload that high, the Associated Press reports.

The number of positive tests reported daily in the state has been steadily inching up in recent weeks, a trend possibly related to increasing numbers of businesses reopening, college campuses reopening and children returning to school.

The governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Saturday there were 1,005 positive cases tallied on the previous day out of 99,953 tests, for a 1% positive rate.

From late July through the start of September the state was seeing an average of around 660 people test positive per day. In the seven-day period that ended Friday, the state had averaged 817 positive tests per day.

Cuomo didn’t comment on the 1,000-case threshold in his daily Covid-19 update, but reiterated his call for vigilance.

Its vital that New Yorkers continue to practice the basic behaviours that drive our ability to fight Covid-19 as we move into the fall and flu season,” Cuomo said in a prepared release.

Wearing masks, socially distancing and washing hands make a critical difference, as does the deliberate enforcement of state guidance by local governments.

That number of daily positive tests in a state of more than 19 million people still puts New York in a much better position than many other states. And it is worlds better than the situation in the state in April, when the number of positive tests per day routinely topped 9,000, even though tests then were hard to get and people were being encouraged not to seek one unless they were gravely ill.

The higher number of positive tests lately could be related to more people seeking tests or being required to take them with the start of the academic year.

Still, the uptick has been a cause for concern. In New York City, health officials have sounded alarms about a rising number of cases in certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens where many private religious schools opened for in-person instruction in early September, warning that those communities could see severe restrictions on public gatherings reinstated if current trends continue.

Public school students in New York City’s elementary, middle and high schools are set to resume in-person instruction next week 29 September and 1October.

Massachusetts’ top law enforcement official has brought criminal charges against former leaders of a nursing home for military veterans, for allegedly making a fatal decision that led to the deaths of many dozens of elderly residents and staff.

Former superintendent Bennett Walsh, 50, and Dr David Clinton, 71, were indicted last week on 10 criminal neglect charges each, according to state attorney general Maura Healey. The two have not been taken into custody and will be arraigned at a later date.

“We began this investigation on behalf of the families who lost loved ones under tragic circumstances and to honor these men who bravely served our country,” Healey said Friday. “We allege that the actions of these defendants during the Covid-19 outbreak at the facility put veterans at higher risk of infection and death and warrant criminal charges.”

Rightwing talk show host Mark Levin said Friday he was consulted on who should be appointed to the US supreme court by the White House.

“This is why I have said I would be very cautious about [Barbara Lagoa],” Levin said Friday on BlazeTV’s LevinTV. “And honestly, I’ve put that on my posts, and I was asked by the White House what I thought and I said exactly the same thing. It’s not that I’m hostile toward her, it’s that she’s pretty much a blank slate. You don’t put blank slates on the Supreme Court.”

Levin, once one of Trump’s more vocal conservative critics, has become one of his more prominent media supporters over the past several years.

Several thousand members of the far-right Proud Boys plan are expected to descend on Portland today, amid simmering tensions nationwide following the decision not to charge Louisville police officers in the killing of Breonna Taylor.

The Associated Press reports:

The Proud Boys, designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, described it as a free speech event to support Trump and the police, restore law and order and condemn anti-fascists, “domestic terrorism” and “violent gangs of rioting felons”.

Local and state elected officials forcefully condemned the event and rushed to shore up law enforcement ranks as leftwing groups organized several rallies in response.

Oregon governor Kate Brown said she was sending state troopers to help the Portland police and creating a unified command structure among city, regional and state law enforcement – a tactic that essentially circumvents a city ban on the use of tear gas as a crowd-control measure.

The state police said a “massive influx” of troopers would be in Portland by Saturday morning.

In the words of the White House pool report, at last night’s rally in Newport News, Trump “called out to Virginia Republican chairman Rich Anderson he asked ‘How are we doing? I don’t want to be wasting my time’ by campaigning in the state. Anderson, just behind POTUS and to his left behind the barrier, and wearing a mask, flashed a right thumb up.”

To mangle CLR James on cricket, what do they know of polling that only polling know?

Fivethirtyeight.com puts Joe Biden 9.9 points up, 51% to 41.1%, in Virginia, although its last registered poll gives the Democrat a five-point lead, down from 14 previously. Realclearpolitics.com says similar.

Virginia was once a red Republican state but it has been changing demographically and it hasn’t gone to the GOP since 2004.

A personal point I’ve made before – Trump is using his presidential plane as a prop at his rallies, when they are held at airports, as in Virginia last night. Charles Lindbergh, in real life someone who also proclaimed “America first”, used his plane as a prop in his quasi-fascist rallies in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.

I wonder how many times I can quote from and link to the op ed former Obama speechwriter David Litt wrote for us this week, about the supreme court, Mitch McConnell, “constitutional hardball” and what the Democrats can do to fight back – after the court switches to a 6-3 conservative majority, which it is going to do.

If hardball must be played, there are plenty of reasons to think that Democrats will ultimately come out on top. In fact, enraged Democrats don’t even have to embrace Donald Trump’s whatever-you-can-get-away with mentality to undo Mitch McConnell’s life’s work. All they have to do is exercise slightly less restraint.

Here’s the piece:

And here’s another quote from David which I find fascinating, on the origins of all this unpleasantness:

In the 1970s, when the modern conservative movement began, an emerging liberal consensus left the right wing feeling it had little to lose by upending our system of government. Democrats, meanwhile, became the party of active government – and were naturally more wary of the possibility that, in an effort to reform institutions, we might erode their legitimacy instead.

That’s heading for Rick Perlstein territory. His theory, which he has expounded through four huge books on the rise of American right, is that it all started with Senator Barry Goldwater, and his quixotic 1964 campaign against Lyndon B Johnson. Here’s an interview with Rick:

Donald Trump’s expected nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is drawing attention to a secretive Catholic “covenant community” called People of Praise that counts Barrett as a member and faces claims of adhering to a “highly authoritarian” structure.

The 48-year-old appellate court judge has said she is a “faithful Catholic” but that her religious beliefs would not “bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge”.

At the same time, the Louisiana native and Notre Dame Law graduate, a favorite among Trump’s evangelical Christian base, has said legal careers ought not to be seen as means of gaining satisfaction, prestige or money, but rather “as a means to the end of serving God”.

Interviews with experts who have studied charismatic Christian groups such as People of Praise, and with former members of the group, plus a review of the group’s own literature, reveal an organization that appears to dominate some members’ everyday lives, in which so-called “heads” – or spiritual advisers – make big life decisions, and in which members are expected to financially support one another.

Married women – such as Barrett – count their husbands as their “heads” and all members are expected to donate 5% of their income to the organization.

Full story:

On the White House schedule today, in case you wondered about which key blocks of support Donald Trump might be looking to reassure with his supreme court pick:

3:15PM THE PRESIDENT participates in a greeting with Evangelical Faith Leaders
Oval Office

5:00PM THE PRESIDENT announces nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Rose Garden

Bad form to quote self, and all that, but this is from a Guardian live blog back in June, when Trump had peaceful protesters gassed and attacked so he could waive a Bible about in front of St John’s church:

After Trump’s gas-protesters-to-walk-to-church-and-hold-up-a-Bible stunt on Monday night, there is of course a lot of conversation going on about just how religious this three-times-married, pussy-grabbing, settlement-paying, race-baiting, greed-worshipping president really is.

As for why evangelical Christians support Trump so fervently, here’s John S Gardner’s review of Ralph Reed’s book, For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump. Safe to say, John isn’t buying: