Amy Coney Barrett Is The Front-Runner To Replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg On The Supreme Court

Amy Coney Barrett, a judge currently serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, which includes parts of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, is considered the most likely person to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, Forbes reported.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, President Donald Trump has promised to move “without delay” to fill the Supreme Court seat that was vacated following Ginsburg’s death on Friday. And the person most likely to fill that job, according to several sources, is Barrett, a reliably conservative jurist who was herself appointed to the federal judiciary by Trump in 2017.

She Was Considered To Replace Anthony Kennedy In 2018

Following the retirement of Anthony Kennedy in 2018, one name that came up in the discussions about who would replace him was that of Barrett. However, that job ultimately went to Brett Kavanaugh, although Trump wasn’t prepared to rule her out for an eventual appointment.

“[I’m] saving her for Ginsburg,” the president reportedly joked at the time.

She Considers Herself An ‘Originalist’ When It Comes To The Constitution

As the Notre Dame student newspaper The Observer reported in 2018, the graduate of the university’s law school noted that she holds to a view, prominent among conservatives, that the Constitution should be interpreted not by what its writers meant when they wrote the words, but by what the words actually say.

“In some respects we should look at that [inflexibility] as a good thing. … It’s a floor, we don’t want to go below this. We don’t want an entirely flexible Constitution because then we would have no constitutional protection at all,” she said at the time.

She’s A Devout Catholic Who Opposes Abortion, Is Supported By Religious Conservatives

As a member of Notre Dame’s “Faculty for Life” association, Barrett signed her name to a document the group sent to Catholic bishops that touched on issues important to religious conservatives; specifically, abortion and gay marriage, as USA Today noted.

Of abortion, she and her co-signers wrote that the church upholds the “value of human life from conception to natural death.” And of marriage, the institution is “founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman.”

During her confirmation hearings for her nomination to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016, Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein told her that “dogma lives loudly within you.”

Barrett, for her part, said that her “personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge.”