Today, RNLA hosted a powerful webinar on Judge Amy Coney Barrett featuring the Network of enlightened Women's Karin Lips and The Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro. The event came as Democrats are even using the President’s COVID-19 diagnosis as a reason to delay hearings on Judge Barrett’s confirmation. The reality is that the Democrats and their liberal allies will go to extreme lengths of any means to defeat or delay Judge Barrett’s nomination. 

One of the worst tactics utilized by liberals is attacking Judge Barrett based on her gender. As Karin Lips explains: "Popular feminists today are quick to mock, delegitimize, and pressure conservative women into silence. To many, we are 'gender traitors' once we speak out or support conservatives in public life."

Judge Barrett on a Few Issues

Judicial philosophy from an article entitled 5 things to know about Amy Coney Barrett:

“If the judge is willing not to apply the law but to decide cases in a line, in accordance with personal preference rather than the law, then she’s not actually functioning as a judge at all. She’s functioning as a policymaker,” Barrett explained.

“And I would have had no interest in the job if the job was about policymaking and about making policy decisions,” the judge said. “My interest is in contributing to our tradition of judges upholding the rule of law.”

“There’s a lot of talk these days about the courts being mere political institutions. But if we reduce the courts to mere politics, then why do we need them? We already have politicians. Courts are not arenas for politics. Courts are places where judges discharge the duty to uphold the rule of law,” she said.

Barrett went on to cite Scalia, who “used to say that a judge who likes every result that she reaches is not a very good judge. In fact, she’s a very bad judge. The law simply does not align with a judge’s political preference or personal preference in every case.”

President Trump announced today that he will announce his nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Saturday at 5:00pm:

I will be announcing my Supreme Court Nominee on Saturday, at the White House! Exact time TBA.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 22, 2020

NEWS: Trump says his announcement on his SCOTUS pick will be at 5p Saturday.

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) September 22, 2020

This afternoon, President Trump announced 20 additional distinguished attorneys and judges to the list of nominees he would consider for any future Supreme Court vacancy.  Polling showed that then-candidate Trump's list in 2016 was important to many voters who supported him, and he kept his promise of choosing off the list when he nominated Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Court.  Further, President Trump selected from his list for many of his highly qualified nominees to lower federal courts during his first term, providing unprecedented transparency regarding judicial nominations from a presidential candidate.

By contrast, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has not released a list, nor has he indicated that he will release one, leaving voters to wonder whom he would consider for any Supreme Court vacancy.  Would a President Biden choose off the troubling Demand Justice list or the secret Alliance for Justice list?  Both possibilities should terrify any American who values the rule of law.

Earlier today, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announced that the President will soon be releasing an updated list of conservatives that he would consider nominating the Supreme Court.  While Joe Biden told reporters in June that his team was putting together a list of Black women that he would consider nominating to the Court, we haven't heard any updates from him or his campaign.

On Friday, the Supreme Court denied a Nevada church's emergency application for injunctive relief to allow the church to operate beyond the limit placed on them by Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak.  The church was challenging the Governor's Directive 021 which allows large groups at restaurants, bars, casinos, gyms, bowling alleys, indoor amusement parks, water parks, and pools as long as they remain at a 50% fire-code capacity limit. However, places of worship are limited to a 50-person limit regardless of the available facilities or precautions taken. The church alleges that the Governor's directive violates the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. While the Court's denial of the church's application was a single sentence long, the 4 dissenting Justices wrote 3 separate dissents totaling 24 pages expressing their concerns over the Governor's blatant disregard for religious Nevadans' Constitutional rights.

One of the hallmarks of the Trump Administration has been placing judges on the federal bench. As of June, President Trump had his 200th federal judicial nominee confirmed by the Senate. Notably President Trump has appointed two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. One of the most lasting effects of these appointments has been the strengthening of religious liberty which has been under attack over the past several decades. In this past year’s term alone, the Court handed down 3 major victories for religious liberty in Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania.

Earlier today, the United States Supreme Court issued opinions in two religious liberties cases – Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania – in a huge victory for the Trump Administration.

Today, the Supreme Court held in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that, under the Free Exercise Clause, if a state has a program giving public dollars to citizens to use at private schools, it cannot tell those citizens that the money can only be used at non-religious private schools.  Montana had decided that its scholarship program funds could not be used at religious schools under the state's Blaine Amendment, a legacy of a failed anti-Catholic amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Many First Amendment advocates hope this opinion proves to be a fatal blow to the discriminatory anti-religious Blaine Amendments still found in many state constitutions.

Today’s decisions by the Supreme Court were a mixed bag.  First, any way you look at it, Chief Justice Robert’s decision in June Medical Services v. Russo is hard to reconcile with his dissent in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. From SCOTUSblog:

Four years ago, by a vote of 5-3, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that (among other things) required doctors who perform abortions to have the right to admit patients at a nearby hospital. In that case, Justice Anthony Kennedy joined his four more liberal colleagues in holding that, although Texas has a genuine interest in protecting the health of pregnant women, there was no evidence that the law actually did anything to promote that interest – but it did make it more difficult for women to get an abortion. Kennedy is no longer on the court, but today it was Chief Justice John Roberts who joined the court’s four liberals in ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo that a similar law from Louisiana is unconstitutional – even as he maintained that he continues to believe that the Texas case was wrongly decided.