Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has been “extremely nimble” in the Senate confirmation hearings despite Democrats’ “utterly absurd” attempts to get her to recuse herself if she gets a seat on the bench, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley said Thursday.
The 48-year-old appellate court judge declined to say whether she would recuse herself from any election-related cases involving President Trump, who nominated her to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
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“The judicial rules on recusal are meant to deal with issues where you have a personal or financial interest in the case or you were involved in the underlying litigation. None of those apply,” Turley told “Fox & Friends.”
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett speaks during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via AP, Pool)
“It would be facially ridiculous for a nominee to take herself out of a major challenge later just because she was nominated, confirmed before an election,” he explained, “and you wouldn’t want that because … what the Democratic senators were doing was trying to influence the outcome of any case by getting her to remove herself and reduce the court to eight.”
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He added, “That, by the way, could result in a tie, which is not what you want in a major traumatic moment for this nation.”
Turley slammed the Democratic senators for bringing in “highly inappropriate” photos of individuals who allegedly benefited from ObamaCare.
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Democrats, he said, were trying to make Barrett look like “some type of judicial serial killer like they were her victims. They’re not. Those pictures are based on a wildly misrepresentation of the ACA case.”
The ACA case, Turley said, wouldn’t even result in the entire overturning of the Affordable Care Act, but is based on a very narrow severability.
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“So, it was really unfair to her but many of her cases were being misrepresented and it was hard for her to deal with that but I thought she did a very good job,” he concluded.
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