Judge Amy Coney Barrett was showered with praise from supporters who called her a “brilliant” choice for the Supreme Court and swatted down attacks on her faith and family.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, dubbed Barrett an “outstanding” nominee.
“Judge Barrett is highly qualified in all the areas that matter – character, integrity, intellect, and judicial disposition,” Graham tweeted shortly after President Trump announced Barrett as his pick.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a Judiciary Committee member, called her “a legal trailblazer w/respect for the law & our nation’s founding principles.
“The Senate will begin a thorough review of Judge Barrett’s nomination, a process that shouldn’t be rushed. Despite previous attacks based on her religious faith, I hope Democrats choose not to engage in another character assassination, as they did against Justice Kavanaugh,” Cornyn tweeted.
March for Life, an anti-abortion group, tweeted that Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic, would be “an excellent choice. Barrett is a scholar, teacher, woman of faith, and mother. She is exactly the trailblazer we want to see on the court.”
“If liberals actually cared about empowering women, they’d be applauding Judge Amy Coney Barrett – a working mom with impeccable legal credentials – not denigrating her with bigoted attacks on her Christian faith,” former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted.
Democrats immediately raised the specter of Barrett taking away health care in the midst of a pandemic.
“A vote by any Senator for Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act and eliminate protections for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, said.
He said Trump was “shamelessly” rushing to fill the seat ahead of the election and that “this reprehensible power grab is a cynical attack on the legitimacy of the Court.”
Vice President Joe Biden struck back at the nominee, saying Trump nominated “a jurist with a written track record of disagreeing with the Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.”
“Vote like your health care is on the ballot — because it is,” Biden tweeted.
Sen. Kamala Harris, a member of the Judiciary Committee and Biden’s running mate, said Barrett “would move the court further right for a generation & harm millions of Americans.”
John Lee Brougher, the managing director of the Tom Steyer-founded activist group NextGen America, immediately took heat for a tweet that questioned how Coney Barrett came to adopt from Haiti two of her seven children and “the treatment of them since then.”
Others poked fun at her reported membership in People of Praise, an ecumenical Christian community, that once called its female leaders by the biblical term, “handmaids.”
Alphonso David, president of The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s biggest LBGTQ advocacy group, said Trump’s pick “would work to dismantle all that Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought for during her extraordinary career.”
“The President has dramatically altered the judiciary to try to dismantle hard-fought rights and progress secured over decades – LGBTQ rights, voting rights, reproductive rights and more,” David said.
Additional reporting by Jon Levine and Mary Kay Linge with Post wires