Hawley meets with Barrett, won’t ask whether she’d overturn Roe v. Wade
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said Thursday his demand that Supreme Court nominees acknowledge Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided” doesn’t require them to say how they would rule in a future case.
Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate and former Missouri attorney general, was among the Republican senators to meet Thursday with federal appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the nation’s high court.
He serves as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will begin hearings on Barrett’s nomination October 12.
Several months before Ginsburg’s death created a vacancy on the court, Hawley announced on the Senate floor that he would only support Supreme Court nominees who “explicitly acknowledged that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, the day it was decided.”
But as Barrett moves through the contentious confirmation process, Hawley appears to have moved away from requiring an explicit acknowledgment in favor of an implicit one based on his reading of her record.
Hawley has repeatedly said that Barrett meets this standard in her view of the 1973 Roe decision, which legalized abortion nationally.
He was asked Thursday as he sat alongside the nominee how he squared this claim with President Donald Trump’s assertion in Tuesday’s debate that the judge’s views of Roe are unknown.
The senator drew a distinction between considering the case wrongly decided and voting to overturn it in the future.
“I won’t speak for the president. I did watch the debate. I think if memory serves, Joe Biden just said Judge Barrett— who I believe soon will be Justice Barrett— would vote a certain way, would vote to overturn,” Hawley told reporters, who were allowed inside a brief portion of the meeting.
“And the president said, ‘You don’t know,’ which I think is consistent .I mean, I haven’t heard Judge Barrett pledge her vote on any case. She can’t do that.”
Barrett, a devout Catholic and former Notre Dame University law professor, has reportedly said she believes life begins at conception and in 2006 signed onto a “right to life” newspaper ad from a group that has called for a reversal of Roe v. Wade. Coney Barrett did not respond to questions about the ad Thursday.
But she has never specifically said how she would rule in a challenge to Roe. In a 2013 lecture, said it was unlikely the court would overturn the decision.
After Trump’s comments during the debate, Hawley’s Democratic predecessor, former Sen. Claire McCaskill, pondered on Twitter whether the Missouri Republican would ask Barrett to explicitly oppose Roe v. Wade during the hearings.
Hawley said Thursday he does not plan to ask the judge how she would rule on the issue of abortion if it came before the court. He disputed that an acknowledgment that a decision was wrongly decided suggests a judge would rule a certain way in a future case, saying legal precedents and other issues would come into play.
“I hope that no senator on the other side will ask her to pledge her vote one way or another. And I certainly won’t. I think the judge’s record as to her understanding of judicial role and Roe and how Roe fits into that is pretty clear. It certainly fits my threshold,” Hawley said.
Told of Hawley’s comments, McCaskill called it a “distinction without a difference. That’s fancy double speak from Yale. If he doesn’t want it overturned why would it matter if it was wrongly decided?”
Another Kansas City area Republican met with Barrett moments before Hawley.
Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran said he was honored to meet with Coney Barrett and gain a better understanding of “what she would mean to the American people, particularly Kansans, on the most important court in the land.”
Kansas is one of the plaintiffs in a case that Barrett could hear if Senate Republicans succeed in confirm before the Nov. 3 election.
The court scheduled to hear arguments Nov. 10 in a constitutional challenge of the Affordable Care Act brought by Republican state attorneys general.
Moran said the case would not factor into his consideration of the judge’s nomination.
“If I asked the judge how she would rule on this pending case and she answered that question, it would cause me to reach the conclusion that I could not vote for her. I want a justice who is going to hear the facts, hear the oral arguments and make a determination based upon the law,” Moran said.
“So it won’t be an issue—it’s an important issue for me as a United States senator— but it does not play into my decision on whether I would vote to confirm Judge Barrett.”
Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of GOP leadership, has not met with Barrett yet, but said Thursday that he already knows he will support her because she was on his personal short list for the Supreme Court.
Blunt said that he has reviewed his comments from 2016 when Senate Republicans refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, during the final year of the Democrat’s presidency.
He said he hasn’t contradicted himself.
Blunt said that Obama had a constitutional obligation in 2016 to nominate a judge to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, but the Senate had no obligation to consider that nominee.
“It takes two things to become a Supreme Court justice. One, the president has to nominate you and, two, the Senate has to agree it’s the right time and the right nominee,” Blunt said. “When the Senate and White House were in political agreement those vacancies were almost always filled.”
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 4:56 PM.
