What Should We Expect From Amy Coney Barrett?

 It now seems clear that Amy Coney Barrett will be nominated by Pres. Trump and confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court Justice. She has been widely hailed by evangelical Christians and other conservatives as an ideal candidate, and she has been equally widely condemned by liberals as “religious nut” who will vote to roll back decades of progress in civil rights and in health care, especially health care for women. What can we expect from her?

Abortion

Ms. Barrett is a devout Catholic, and as such, she believes that life begins at conception and that abortion is always immoral. She has said that she does not think that Roe v. Wade will be overturned but that restrictions will be enacted, especially on late-term abortions. She also believes that requiring employers to cover birth control or abortion in health care policies they provide for their employees is an infringement on the employers’ religious freedom. So, we can be confident that she will vote to restrict access to abortions as much as she can.

Health Care

On the broader question of health care, she follows her mentor Justice Scalia in believing that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. She believes that the Supreme Court decisions that found the ACA to be constitutional did so only by stretching and distorting the language of the statute beyond its plausible meaning in order to save the statute. So, she will probably find the ACA unconstitutional if she has an opportunity to do so.

I suspect, however, that the result of overturning the Affordable Care Act will not be what conservatives would like to see. Support for some kind of national health insurance program is widespread in the United States, and if the ACA is overturned, we have a fine alternative waiting in the wings: Medicare for All.  Medicare is a successful program that has been in operation for more than half a century. Its constitutionality is firmly established.  All we would have to do would be to broaden it to cover all of us instead of only those over sixty-five. We would of course have to raise the taxes that would support the program, but people who are now paying a substantial part of their incomes for private health insurance would probably come out ahead financially, and companies would no longer have to provide health insurance to their employees. So, we can expect that if the ACA is overturned, a serious effort to enact Medicare for All will follow.

Social Justice

What would Barrett’s positions be on broader questions of social justice? We do not really know, and she may vote very conservatively on such issues. However, as a devout Catholic, she may support the Church’s strong teachings on social justice. She has in fact written on this issue in connection with the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. She believes that a Catholic judge should recuse him-/herself in death penalty cases. Her strongest statement on social justice may come from the commencement address she gave at Notre Dame, where she is on the faculty. She said there that Notre Dame as a Catholic institution aspires to produce a “different kind of lawyer,” and she asked the students to think about what that might mean. She answered her question by saying,

I’m just going to identify one way in which I hope that you, as graduates of Notre Dame, will fulfill the promise of being a different kind of lawyer. And that is this: that you will always keep in mind that your legal career is but a means to an end, and as Father Jenkins told you this morning, that end is building the kingdom of God.

This statement is ambiguous. What does it mean to “build the kingdom of God?” A non-Catholic might fear plausibly that it means that Notre Dame’s graduates should promote the power of the Catholic Church in the United States. A non-Christian might fear plausibly that it means that Christianity should be promoted as an “established religion,” and that Christian teachings should have official status in the United States.

However, a devout Christian might believe that we work to build the kingdom of God by promoting the values of justice, mercy and love that Jesus and the Hebrew prophets so eloquently expressed. I belong to an organization called ESTHER-Fox Valley, and many of its members – including a number of Catholics –   are motivated by precisely this idea. Amy Barrett is a devout Christian. I do not know what she thinks, but apparently, I will have plenty of opportunity to find out. I hope that she takes seriously the social teachings of the church to which she belongs.