Trump offered Barrett Supreme Court nomination same day he met her, according to Senate questionnaire

GOP officials moving at ‘rapid’ pace to get nomination through by 3 November election

Donald Trump offered Amy Coney Barrett the Supreme Court nomination the same day he met the judge on 21 September, three days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, according to her Senate questionnaire.

Ms Barrett submitted her 69-page nominee questionnaire - which recounts her most impactful cases, financial information, work history, public writings and details of her selection process - on Tuesday evening.

According to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post,  Ms Barrett tells senators that she was first contacted for the vacancy on Saturday 19 September, the day after Ginsburg's death, by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

She was invited to Washington for a meeting with Mr Trump on Monday and was offered the nomination that same day, according to the questionnaire. Mr Trump announced his choice in a Rose Garden ceremony on Saturday.

Among the information in the questionnaire, which senators will review, Ms Barrett listed a net worth of nearly $2.6m (£2m).

Ms Barrett spent much of Tuesday beginning her campaigning with GOP senators in her bid to be confirmed as Republicans in the Senate and at the White House accelerated their efforts to fill the vacancy before the 3 November election.

Ms Barrett met with nine GOP senators in her first foray to the Capitol since she was announced as Mr Trump's pick - visits that were largely ceremonial and only publicly affirmed the near-unanimous Republican support for the appellate court judge.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, GOP officials were working at a rapid clip to move her nomination through the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had sent Ms Barrett the usual nominee questionnaire on Sunday as lawyers and aides continued to vet her documents ahead of at least three days of confirmation hearings beginning 12 October. 

Democrats continued to weigh their options for a deeper scrub of her record, including additional document requests, according to aides - although Ms Barrett, with limited service in government aside from her judgeship, would lack a lengthy paper trail aside from her legal writings and opinions.

“We truly do believe that Judge Barrett represents the best of America personally, in terms of her great intellect, her great background,” said Mike Pence, who attended Ms Barrett's meeting with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. “We have every confidence that as the American people learn more about Judge Amy Coney Barrett, they will be as inspired as President Trump was when he made her nomination.”

Mr McConnell said he was pleased to begin the process, though he continued on Tuesday to decline to say whether Ms Barrett would be confirmed before the election. Republican leaders have crafted a timeline to do precisely that, barring no surprises.

“I left our discussion even more convinced that President Trump has nominated exactly the kind of outstanding person whom the American people deserve to have on their highest court,” Mr McConnell said later on Tuesday. “Americans deserve brilliant judges with first-rate legal minds. Judge Barrett is that and then some.”

Democrats continued to decry the process while a growing chorus of Democratic senators insisted that Ms Barrett would need to recuse herself from any election-related cases if she is seated on the Supreme Court, considering Mr Trump's explicit link between getting his nominee confirmed and justices hearing any election-related legal challenges that would arise.

“I think, given the situation, it would certainly be appropriate from an ethics standpoint,” said senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership. “I mean, he clearly is looking for a way to create some kind of chaos or distrust in the results and somehow get that into the court.”

Republicans dismissed the question of recusal and whether it was a conflict of interest for Ms Barrett to hear such a case. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham said that it was “one of the most absurd ideas I've ever heard” and that Ms Barrett had “no legal disqualification”.

“The entire reason the Senate should act and act promptly to confirm a ninth justice is so that the Supreme Court can resolve any cases that arise in the wake of the election,” said senator Ted Cruz. “This election is a closely contested election.”

In 2016, with a vacancy on the court and the election looming, Mr Cruz suggested that Republicans could indefinitely block any nominee of Democrat Hillary Clinton if she won the presidency.

“There is long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices,” Mr Cruz said then.

In the questionnaire, Ms Barrett was asked a standard question about her most significant decisions as a judge. She made her first choice a gun rights case in which she dissented, but has won praise from conservatives.

In Kanter v Barr, Ms Barrett relied heavily on the “originalist” approach to Constitution interpretation favoured by her old boss, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and the court's most conservative members.

Ms Barrett dissented from a panel decision that upheld federal and Wisconsin laws banning felons from having guns. They were being challenged by a man convicted of a nonviolent crime, mail fraud. Two judges on the panel said such laws are reasonably related to the government's important goal of keeping guns out of the hands of those convicted of serious crimes.

But Ms Barrett, launching a deep dive into the country's past, said legislatures at the time of the founding took away gun rights from those who were believed to be a threat, not just convicted of certain crimes.

“History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous,” she wrote.

Founding-era legislatures imposed restrictions on civic rights such as voting and jury service, Ms Barrett wrote, “not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun”.

“In 1791 - and for well more than a century afterward - legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety,” Ms Barrett wrote.

Carrie Severino, a conservative legal activist, wrote in the National Review that “Judge Barrett has been a champion of originalism”.

Ms Barrett in the questionnaire also listed cases dealing with the Trump administration's tightening of benefits for those seeking green cards, and a case in which the panel questioned the fairness of Purdue University's treatment of a male student accused of sexual misconduct.

The Republican senators Ms Barrett met with were Mr McConnell, Mr Cruz, Mr Graham, former Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Rick Scott of Florida, John Thune of South Dakota and Mike Lee of Utah. They largely praised her record and jurisprudence and made pointed nods to her being a conservative female pioneer in the mould of Ginsburg, the liberal justice she would replace.

“She's had an outstanding [career] as I said in academia but she is also well-known for mentoring women in the law, and something that you could surely say you followed Justice Ginsburg on,” Mr Grassley told Ms Barrett as they sat in socially distanced chairs in a meeting room at the Capitol.

Several key Senate Democrats have said outright that they will not meet with Ms Barrett, including minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who said: “We need to treat this nomination like the illegitimate power grab it is.”

It was unclear on Tuesday what senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, would do. Other Democrats on the committee, such as senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Cory Booker of New Jersey, have indicated that they would meet with her.

As they continued to hash out their procedural strategy, Democrats also pressed forward in their concerted effort to make the Supreme Court fight about healthcare and the fate of the Affordable Care Act, whose constitutionality will be argued before the justices the week after the elections.

Mr Schumer, in a rare move, successfully teed up a procedural vote on legislation attempting to bar the Justice Department from fighting to kill Obamacare in the courts. It is highly unusual for anyone other than the majority leader to make such a move in the Senate, and it was unclear whether Republicans were aware of Mr Schumer's action beforehand.

Although the largely symbolic measure will not advance in the GOP-controlled Senate, it allows Democrats to force Republicans to go on record with an uncomfortable vote on the issue of healthcare and the ACA's coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

“The American people should make no mistake,” Mr Schumer said, “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.”

The administration has eschewed a traditional outside liaison to help Ms Barrett navigate Capitol Hill throughout her confirmation process, relying primarily on Mr Meadows and Mr Cipollone to guide her through her fight.

Both West Wing officials were present for the meetings on Tuesday.

Mr Trump nominated Ms Barrett, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, on Saturday to replace Ginsburg, who died 18 September at age 87. Since the hours after Ginsburg's death, Senate Republicans have moved quickly to affirm that her replacement will get confirmed this year, despite the proximity to the election and their decision four years ago to block Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court for eight months; that year they insisted that voters should decide which party got to fill the seat.

Two Republican senators - Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska - out of the 53 have said the Senate should wait on the nomination until after the election.

“It's very legitimate,” Mr Thune, the No 2 Senate Republican, said of the process. “It's very constitutional.”

The Washington Post