President Donald Trump‘s announced Saturday night that the Supreme Court nominee he plans to announce next week to fill the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be a woman, spotlighting two conservative women as his potential pick. 

During a campaign rally in North Carolina, Trump declared ‘I will be putting forth a nominee this week, it will be a woman’, later adding his pick would be a ‘very talented, very brilliant woman’ because ‘I like women more than I like men’.  

As he left the White House for the rally, the president identified two women as front runners: Amy Coney Barrett, 48, of the Chicago-based 7th Circuit and Barbara Lagoa, 52, of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit as possible nominees.

Barrett is a devout Catholic and mother of seven from Indiana, who has adopted two kids from Haiti and has a biological child with special needs.

She is a member of a Christian group name People of Praise, where members are assigned a ‘handmaiden’,  a personal adviser with whom they are encouraged to confess personal sins, financial information and other sensitive disclosures. 

The other named front runner is Lagoa, a Cuban American from Florida whose parents fled Castro five decades ago. She has spoken about how her father longed to be a lawyer but was forced to abandon his dream because of the communist leader. 

Her nomination has the potential to greatly aid Trump politically in the crucial swing state. 

The other five women on Trump’s shortlist of 20 names are Kate Todd, deputy White House counsel; Sarah Pitlyk, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri; Allison Jones Rushing, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; Martha Pacold, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois; and Bridget Bade, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Amy Coney Barrett 

Mother of seven, Amy Coney Barrett emerges now as a front runner after she was shortlisted for the nomination in 2018, which eventually went to Brett Kavanaugh. Trump called the federal appellate court judge ‘very highly respected’ when questioned about her Saturday. 

Born in New Orleans in 1972, she was the first and only woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. 

With five biological and two adopted children, friends say she is a devoted mother. With just an hour to go until she was voted into the 7th District Court of Appeals by the U.S. Senate in 2017, Barrett was outside trick-or-treating with her kids.

Her youngest biological child has Down Syndrome.  

In 2017, her affiliation to the small, tightly knit Christian group called People of Praise caused concern while she was a nominee for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. 

The group’s ultra-conservative religious tenets helped spur author Margaret Atwood to publish The Handmaid’s Tale, a story about a religious takeover of the U.S. government which is now a hit TV show, according to a 1986 interview with the writer. 

Members of the group swear a lifelong oath of loyalty, called a covenant, to one another. They are also assigned and held accountable to a personal adviser, known until recently as a ‘head’ for men and a ‘handmaid’ for women.

Members are encouraged to confess personal sins, financial information and other sensitive disclosures to these advisors and advisors are allowed to report these admissions to group leadership if necessary, according to an account of one former member. 

The organization itself says that the term ‘handmaid’ was a reference to Jesus’s mother Mary’s description of herself as a ‘handmaid of the Lord.’ They said they recently stopped using the term due to cultural shifts and now use the name ‘women leaders.’ 

The group deems that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family. However the heads and handmaids are there to give direction on important decisions, including whom to date or marry, where to live, whether to take a job or buy a home, and how to raise children’.

Unmarried members of the group are placed living with married member couples. Members often look to buy or rent homes near other members. 

They believe in prophecy, speaking in tongues and divine healings. Founded in 1971, it now has an estimated 2,000 members. 

At least 10 members of Barrett’s family, not including their children, also belong to the group. Barrett’s father, Mike Coney, serves on the People of Praise’s powerful 11-member board of governors, described as the group’s ‘highest authority.’ Her mother Linda was also a handmaiden.   

According to legal experts, loyalty oaths such at the one Barrett would have taken to People of Praise could raise legitimate questions about a judicial nominee’s independence and impartiality. 

‘These groups can become so absorbing that it’s difficult for a person to retain individual judgment,’ said Sarah Barringer Gordon, a professor of constitutional law and history at the University of Pennsylvania. 

‘I don’t think it’s discriminatory or hostile to religion to want to learn more’ about her relationship with the group.

Yet a leader of the group claimed that it would hold no influence over Barrett.   

‘If and when members hold political offices, or judicial offices, or administrative offices, we would certainly not tell them how to discharge their responsibilities,’ Craig S. Lent added. 

During her professional career, Barrett spent two decades as a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, from which she holds her bachelor’s and law degrees.

She was named ‘Distinguished Professor of the Year’ three separate years, a title decided by students. 

A former clerk for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, she was nominated by Trump to serve on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 and confirmed in a 55-43 vote by the Senate later that year.

At the time, three Democratic senators supported her nomination: Joe Donnelly (Ind.), who subsequently lost his 2018 reelection bid, Tim Kaine (Va.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), according to The Hill.

She was backed by every GOP senator at the time, but she did not disclose her relationship with People of Praise, which led to later criticism. 

Barrett is well-regarded by the religious right because of this devout faith.

Yet these beliefs are certain to cause problems with her conformation and stand in opposition to the beliefs of Ginsburg, who she would be replacing. Axios reported in 2019 that Trump told aides he was ‘saving’ Barrett to replace Ginsburg.

Her deep Catholic faith was cited by Democrats as a large disadvantage during her 2017 confirmation hearing for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

‘If you’re asking whether I take my faith seriously and I’m a faithful Catholic, I am,’ Barrett responded during that hearing, ‘although I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge.’

Republicans now believe that she performed well in her defense during this hearing, leaving her potentially capable of doing the same if facing the Senate Judiciary Committee.

She is a former member of the Notre Dame’s ‘Faculty for Life’ and in 2015 signed a letter to the Catholic Church affirming the ‘teachings of the Church as truth.’

Among those teachings were the ‘value of human life from conception to natural death’ and marriage-family values ‘founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman’.

She has previously written that Supreme Court precedents are not sacrosanct. Liberals have taken these comments as a threat to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide.

Barrett wrote that she agrees ‘with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it’.

Among the other statements that have cause concern for liberal are her declaration that ObamaCare’s birth control mandate is ‘grave violation of religious freedom.’ 

She has also sided with Trump in immigration. 

In a case from June 2020, IndyStar reports that she was the sole voice on a three-judge panel that supported allowing federal enforcement of Trump’s public charge immigration law in Illinois. 

The law would have prevented immigrants from getting legal residency in the United States if they rely on public benefits like food stamps or housing vouchers.   

She is married to Jesse M. Barrett, a partner at SouthBank Legal in South Bend and former Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana. 

Barbara Lagoa  

A Cuban American who parents fled to the U.S., Lagoa was born in Miami in 1967. She grew up in the largely Cuban American city of Hialeah.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, her parents fled Cuba over five decades ago when Fidel Castro’s Communist dictatorship took over. 

During the 2019 news conference in Miami announcing her appointment to the Florida Supreme Court, she told the crowd that her father had to give up his ‘dream of becoming a lawyer’ because of Castro. 

If nominated to the nation’s high court by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, the mother of three daughters would be the second Latino justice to ever serve.

She served on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for less than a year after being appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate on an 80-15 vote

Prior to that she also spent less than a year in her previous position as the first Latina and Cuban American to serve on the Florida Supreme Court.

Lagoa is considered a protégé of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally.

Her position in crucial swing state Florida could help Trump politically.

Last week, she voted in the majority in a ruling that barred hundreds of thousands of Florida felons who have served their time from voting unless they pay fees and fines owed to the state.

This decision could have a major impact on the presidential race as Florida is often won by a candidate by only razor-thin margins.

‘Florida’s felon re-enfranchisement scheme is constitutional,’ Lagoa wrote in a 20-page concurrence, according to USA Today.

‘It falls to the citizens of the state of Florida and their elected state legislators, not to federal judges, to make any additional changes to it.’

In 2000 Lagoa was one of a dozen mostly pro bono lawyers who represented the Miami family of Elián González, a Cuban citizen who became embroiled in a heated international custody and immigration controversy.

In 2016, while in the Florida Third District Court of Appeal, she wrote an opinion reversing the conviction of Adonis Losada, a former Univision comic actor sentenced to 153 years in prison for collecting child porn. 

She ruled that a Miami-Dade judge erred in not allowing Losada to defend himself at trial. 

That same month she became unpopular with free press advocates when she was one of three judges who allowed a Miami judge to close a courtroom to the public for a key hearing in a high-profile murder case. 

They ruled that publicity surrounding the machete murder of a student in Homestead might unfairly sway jurors at a future trial. 

Lagoa is a graduate of Florida International University and Columbia University Law.

She is is a member of the conservative Federalist Society, which stresses that judges should ‘say what the law is, not what it should be.’

She is married to lawyer Paul C. Huck Jr., and her father-in-law is United States District Judge Paul Huck. 

Joe Biden is accused of hypocrisy after a 2016 op-ed emerged in which he slammed Republicans for holding up a Supreme Court appointment, stating that it is the ‘constitutional duty’ of a president to nominate if a vacancy becomes available.  

He made the comments in a March 2016 op-ed with the New York Times, in which he added that he was ‘surprised and saddened’ to hear Republican senators say they would not longer accept a nomination because it was an election year.  

His words resurfaced this week after he blasted President Donald Trump for moving to nominate a candidate to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday. 

Biden claimed that the nomination should wait until after the election in 44 days. 

Trump hit back at Biden Saturday night, calling on the former Vice President to release his own list of potential Supreme Court picks and accusing him of being afraid to alienate voters by releasing the names ahead of November 3. 

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On Friday, shortly after Ginsburg’s death as the political battle about her replacement began, Biden tweeted his opposition to Trump attempting to push through a nominee in the next 40-plus days. 

‘Let me be clear: The voters should pick a President, and that President should select a successor to Justice Ginsburg,’ he wrote. 

Yet on numerous occasions in 2016, he hit out at Republicans for saying the same. 

‘The president has the constitutional duty to nominate; the Senate has the constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent,’ he wrote in the Time op-ed on the subject. 

‘It is written plainly in the Constitution that both presidents and senators swear an oath to uphold and defend.’ 

‘That’s why I was so surprised and saddened to see Republican leaders tell President Obama and me that they would not even consider a Supreme Court nominee this year,’ he added. 

‘No meetings. No hearings. No votes. Nothing. It is an unprecedented act of obstruction. And it risks a stain on the legacy of all those complicit in carrying out this plan.’

At the time, Republican senators had refused to move forward with the vetting process for Obama’s nomination to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. 

His death on February 13, 2016, opened up a vacancy to which Obama nominated Merrick Garland. 

Garland was never confirmed and Trump’s pick Neil Gorsuch was appointed to the court. 

Biden has previously said that if a vacancy opens before summer in an election year, he believes the president has the green light to pick nominees. 

In the last few weeks before voters head to the polls, however, he thinks they should be held off. 

This has often been called the ‘Biden Rule’ after the then-Senator made a 1992 speech encouraging a Supreme Court vacancy to be pushed post-election.   

After rumors surfaced in mid-June that a Justice was soon to retire, Biden claimed it ‘would create immense political acrimony’ to nominate too close to the election. 

‘So I called on the president to wait until after the election to submit a nomination if a sitting justice were to create a vacancy by retiring before November,’ he wrote.

‘And if the president declined to do that, I recommended that the Judiciary Committee not hold hearings “until after the political campaign season is over.” 

‘I know there is an argument that no nominee should be voted on in the last year of a presidency. But there is nothing in the Constitution — or our history — to support this view,’ Biden continued. 

‘Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was confirmed in the last year of Ronald Reagan’s second term. I know. I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time.

‘And we promptly gave him a hearing, a vote in committee and a full vote on the floor.’

In another 2016 speech broadcast by PBS, Biden made his position on moving forward with a nomination in an election year clear. 

‘I would go forward with a confirmation process as chairman, even a few months before a presidential election, if the nominee were chosen with the advice, and not merely the consent, of the Senate, just as the Constitution requires,’ he said. 

‘My consistent advice to president’s of both parties, including this president [Obama] has been that we should engage fully in the constitutional process of advice and consent. 

‘And my consistent understanding of the constitution has been, the Senate must do so as well. Period. They have an obligation to do so.’ 

Despite Biden and Democrats arguments, Trump claimed at a rally in North Carolina on Saturday night that there was still enough time to effectively vet a nominee in the 44 days left before the election. 

He also slammed Biden for refusing to release his own list of potential nominees, claiming that the former Vice President did not want to run the risk of losing far-left voters if his list was too moderate and vice versa.

Trump claimed that if Biden released a list of names too moderate, he would lose ‘the entire East Coast’ and lose the election. 

Earlier on Saturday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News that Biden needed to release his list to help voters to make up their minds. 

‘The former vice president, in all due respect, instead of telling the current president what to do, he needs to tell voters where he stands,’ McEnany said.  

‘We don’t know who is on his Supreme Court list. We don’t know what kind of justices he would nominate. 

‘We know very squarely this president’s been very transparent putting forward two lists as to exactly not just what his justices would look like but what their names would be,’ McEnany said of Trump’s picks. 

‘This is paramount importance to the American voters,’ she added.  

‘This is now a lynchpin issue of this election and Joe Biden, you know, where do you stand? What do your justices look like? Do they believe in the Constitution and abide by the Constitution. Do they believe in the plain words a statute? He needs to answer those questions before telling President Trump exactly how to move forward.’

Biden has said he does not want to release any names until they’ve been properly vetted but he will chose an African American woman.  

Ginsburg’s death seemed certain to stoke enthusiasm in both political parties as the election could now be viewed as referendum on the high court’s decisions, including the future of abortion rights. 

Democrats raised more than $71 million in the hours after Ginsburg’s death, indicating her passing has already galvanized the party’s base. 

Typically, it takes several months to vet and hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, and time is short before November. 

Key senators may be reluctant to cast votes so close to the election, even if Trump nominates.  

With a slim GOP majority, 53 seats in the 100-member chamber, Trump’s choice could afford to lose only a few.

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, who sets the calendar in the Senate and has made judicial appointments his priority, declared unequivocally in a statement that Trump’s nominee would receive a confirmation vote. 

In 2016, McConnell refused to consider President Barack Obama´s nominee months before the election, eventually preventing a vote on Judge Merrick Garland. 

McConnell did not specify the timing if a Trump nomination is made next week. 

But trying for confirmation in a lame-duck session after the November 3 election, if Trump had lost to Biden or Republicans had lost the Senate, would carry further political complications.

Democrats immediately denounced McConnell’s move as hypocritical, pointing out that he refused to call hearings for Garland 237 days before the 2016 election. 

The 2020 election is 44 days away.

The average number of days to confirm a justice, according to the Congressional Research Service, is 69, which would be after the election. 

But some Republicans quickly noted that Ginsburg was confirmed in just 42 days. 

Obama waited more than a month to nominate Garland after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016.

Four GOP defections could defeat a nomination, while a tie vote could be broken by Vice President Mike Pence. 

The next pick could shape important decisions beyond abortion rights, including any legal challenges that may stem from the 2020 election. 

In the interim, if the court were to take cases with eight justices, 4-4 ties would revert the decision to a lower court; for instance, the Affordable Care Act could then be struck down by a lower Texas court.