Trump says he will announce Supreme Court nominee this week

President Donald Trump called into “Fox & Friends” Monday and said that he plans to announce his nominee for the Supreme Court this weekend. 

“I think it’ll be on Friday or Saturday and we want to pay respect. It looks like we will have probably services on Thursday or Friday, as I understand it. And I think the respect we should wait for the services to be over for Justice Ginsburg. So we’re looking at probably Friday or maybe Saturday,” Trump said.

The president has vowed to name a woman to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“It will be a woman, a very talented, very brilliant woman,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday night. “I haven’t chosen yet, but we have numerous women on the list.”

CNN is reporting that Amy Coney Barrett is the favorite to be the next nominee. Barrett, a former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was vetted when Trump chose her to serve on the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals. 

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Barrett is a devout Catholic and mother of seven. She and her husband, Jesse M Barrett, have five biological children and adopted two from Haiti. Her devotion to her faith is seen among progressives as a warning that she will move to overturn abortion rights. 

“Amy Coney Barrett meets Donald Trump’s two main litmus tests: She has made clear she would invalidate the A.C.A. and take health care away from millions of people and undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom,” said Nan Aron, the president of Alliance for Justice, a liberal group, to The New York Times. 

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Trump also called for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to release a list of potential Supreme Court picks.

Biden said on Sunday he would not release specific names but reiterated that his choice would be a Black woman. He said it would be unfair to name a potential nominee because “she would endure those attacks for months on end without being able to defend herself.”

The former vice president maintains that the nomination should be held off until after the Nov. 3 election, which was Ginsburg’s final wish, according to her granddaughter. To move forward with voting on a nominee this close to the election, Biden says, is “just an exercise in raw political power.”

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