Democrats vow ‘sparks will fly’ over Trump’s Supreme Court pick

FILE PHOTO: Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh pictured at his office in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, U.S., July 11, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Democrats plan to hammer President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on his views on abortion and presidential power in hearings starting on Tuesday but the conservative judge looks likely to be confirmed.

“A good judge must be an umpire – a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy,” Kavanaugh will say at the opening of the hearing, according to a selection of his remarks released in advance. “I don’t decide cases based on personal or policy preferences.”

Trump’s fellow Republicans hold narrow majority control of the Senate so they can approve Kavanaugh if they stay united. So far, there were no signs of defections, with the Senate likely to vote by the end of the month.

The hearing, expected to last four days, gives Democrats a chance to make their case against Kavanaugh ahead of November’s congressional elections.

“There will be sparks at this hearing. Sparks will fly, and there will be a lot of heat,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the judiciary committee that will convene the hearings, said on Friday.

Trump nominated Kavanaugh, 53, to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27 at age 81. He is Trump’s second nominee to a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest judicial body. Trump last year appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, part of his push to make the courts more conservative.

Liberals are concerned Kavanaugh could provide a decisive fifth vote on the nine-justice court to overturn or weaken Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that legalized abortion nationwide.

Without Kennedy, the court is now split 4-4 between conservatives and liberals. Kennedy was a solid conservative but sided with the court’s liberals on some issues, including abortion and gay rights.

Beyond social issues, Kavanaugh is also likely to face questions about his views on investigating sitting presidents and the ongoing probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

Kavanaugh spent four years working for Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated former Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Kavanaugh also spent more than five years working for Republican President George W. Bush.

In 2009, many years after the Starr inquiry, Kavanaugh wrote a law review article saying presidents should be free from the distractions of civil lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and investigations while in office.

As a judge, he has amassed a solidly conservative record since 2006 on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

With Senator John McCain’s death, the Republican Senate majority shrank to 50-49, but McCain’s replacement is likely be seated before a final vote on Kavanaugh, restoring the majority to 51-49 and providing the votes needed for confirmation.

Liberal activists have pinned their slim hopes to block Kavanaugh on two Republican senators who support abortion rights: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. So far, neither has indicated she is likely to oppose Kavanaugh.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by David Gregorio and Bill Trott)

Top Supreme Court candidates’ views on abortion under scrutiny

FILE PHOTO: Trees cast shadows outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, U.S., June 25, 2018. REUTERS/Toya Sarno Jordan/File Photo

By Andrew Chung

NEW YORK (Reuters) – From the moment Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court last week, speculation has centered on whether his replacement would vote to overturn a woman’s right to abortion.

But the individuals considered top contenders for Kennedy’s seat have produced a sparse record of legal rulings and writings on the subject, which makes it hard to predict how they might rule in abortion-related cases.

President Donald Trump promised during his campaign to appoint “pro-life justices” who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. In recent days, however, the president has said he will not ask candidates about their views on the subject. Trump has said he will announce his nominee on July 9 and that he will make his selection from a list of candidates compiled by conservative legal activists.

On Friday, the president said he had narrowed the field to about five, and sources familiar with the president’s thinking say the top contenders are Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals; Amy Coney Barrett, who was named by Trump to the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; Thomas Hardiman, who serves on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; Raymond Kethledge of the Cincinnati, Ohio-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; and Amul Thapar, whom Trump named to the 6th Circuit.

Of that group, Barrett, a professor at Notre Dame Law School before Trump appointed her to the appeals court, has attracted the most attention on abortion.

She has spoken publicly about her conviction that life begins at conception, and in a 2003 law journal article, she argued that courts could be more flexible in overturning prior “errors” in precedent. She noted that courts have struggled over when to keep “an erroneous decision” on the books, citing as an example Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a major 1992 Supreme Court ruling that upheld Roe.

Some progressive groups have pointed to the article as evidence of Barrett’s willingness to overturn Roe. But she has also raised doubts about whether the high court would ever overturn Roe, according to a 2013 article in Notre Dame Magazine.

Her traditional Catholic beliefs became a flashpoint last September during her confirmation hearing in the Senate. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said to Barrett during the hearing. Barrett told the senators that her faith would not affect her decisions as a judge.

While little is known about Kavanaugh’s personal views on abortion, last October he was part of a panel of judges that issued an unsigned order preventing an illegal immigrant teenager detained by the government from immediately obtaining an abortion. That decision was overturned by the full appeals court a few days later.

Dissenting from that decision, Kavanaugh warned that the court was embracing “a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.” Litigation over the issue is continuing.

Hardiman joined an opinion in 2010 that overturned the conviction of an anti-abortion protester arrested outside the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia. Though the court said park rangers had violated his free speech rights, the case was not about the right to abortion itself.

In April, Hardiman allowed the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns, to intervene in a lawsuit against Trump’s plan to expand employer exemptions from an Obamacare birth control insurance requirement. For years, the organization has been at the forefront in challenging the mandate’s legality. Though the case was not directly about abortion, groups favoring abortion rights worry that Hardiman’s ruling signals his sympathies on the issue.

Democratic politicians and liberal groups have said they assume that all those on Trump’s list of potential candidates would overturn Roe v. Wade, given that Trump has said he will only consider such candidates.

“I take the president at his word,” said Daniel Goldberg, legal director for Alliance For Justice, a liberal legal advocacy group that has researched Trump’s judicial nominees.

Leonard Leo, a conservative legal activist on leave from the Federalist Society, is advising Trump on judicial selections, and he said no one asked the candidates about their views on abortion before they were placed on the list.

“These people weren’t even talked to when they were put on the list,” said Leo. “No one was asked these questions and as far as I know no one has been asked these questions if they were brought into the process in the White House.”

Republicans control the Senate by only a slim majority, making it important for Trump’s nominee to win the support of all Republican members, including moderates.

On Sunday, Republican Senator Susan Collins said on CNN that she would not support a nominee who “demonstrated hostility” to Roe.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Sue Horton)