The Nebraska senator who has a rocky relationship with Trump explains his longtime enthusiasm for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
The Nebraska senator who has a rocky relationship with Trump explains his longtime enthusiasm for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
A fter Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in 2018, Ben Sasse had three words on his mind: Amy Coney Barrett.
They’d been on his mind for a while. The Nebraska senator had first started hearing about Barrett from faculty at Notre Dame Law School, where Barrett was a professor, shortly after Trump was elected in 2016 and Sasse joined the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Notre Dame Law School is not at all a monolithic place, and yet people all across the spectrum there adore her. Lots of people who don’t love her originalism and textualism — which I do love — they still love her,” Sasse tells National Review. “She’s an incredibly special individual when you combine her brain and her sort of winsome demeanor.”
Sasse estimates he had spoken to the president “more than half a dozen, maybe ten” times before Kennedy had retired about Barrett, who was confirmed as an appeals-court judge in 2017. “Well before a Kennedy vacancy, I’ve been urging him that after the next vacancy, Amy Coney Barrett should be at the top of his list.”
Barrett was ultimately the runner-up to Brett Kavanaugh for the Kennedy seat. In 2018, she was seen inside the White House as too risky of a bet because the Senate was controlled 51–49 by Republicans, which gave moderate Republicans Lisa Murkowkski and Susan Collins the power to sink a nominee.
Republicans now hold a 53–47 Senate majority, and when the latest vacancy arose following the death of Justice Ginsburg, Barrett was a nearly unanimous pick among conservatives. (Those who wanted Trump to pick appeals-court judge Barbara Lagoa tended to hail from Lagoa’s native Florida or thought she could provide a boost to Trump’s reelection odds.)
Sasse was a staunch Trump critic in 2016 and cast a ballot for Mike Pence for president, but the president and the Senate Judiciary Committee member developed “a relationship that was talking judges” beginning with the confirmation process of Neil Gorsuch.
The overall relationship between Trump and Sasse has nevertheless been rocky. In June, Sasse blasted Trump for his photo-op at St. John’s church, and in August he criticized the president’s executive actions on COVID relief as “unconstitutional slop.” Trump responded to the latter criticism by writing on Twitter that “RINO Ben Sasse” had “gone rogue, again.”
Sasse’s conflicted relationship with Trump led one Washington Post columnist — who is fearful that a new Supreme Court justice and other conservatives on the Court might rule against Joe Biden in a case involving the election — to speculate on Friday that Sasse might vote against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee if Sasse discovered “some as-yet-hidden reservoir of courage.”
But when it comes to confirming Barrett, he’s as enthusiastic as one can get. On Saturday evening, Sasse issued a statement calling Barrett “an ally to the rule of law” with “unsurpassed character, reputation, and intellect.”
Sasse, who did not speak directly to Trump in the week leading up to Barrett’s nomination, says he was an early Barrett advocate because “I think her jurisprudence is just amazing. Her textualism and her originalism, and in the way she argues, she’s a lawyer’s lawyer who does her homework.”
“And I think that’s why you see the kind of range of support you have for her in the scholarly community even by people who wouldn’t assume that they’d support the outcomes of the way she judges,” he adds.
After I spoke to Sasse, Noah Feldman, a liberal Harvard law professor who worked as a Supreme Court clerk with Amy Coney in 1998–1999, published an article proving Sasse’s point. It almost made the senator’s praise seem faint.
“I disagree with much of her judicial philosophy and expect to disagree with many, maybe even most of her future votes and opinions. Yet despite this disagreement, I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed,” Feldman wrote. He added that Barrett has an “ideal judicial temperament of calm and decorum” and that her “combination of smart and nice will be scary for liberals.”
Given that even liberals who know Barrett hold her in such high regard, it’s no surprise that a conservative who has been critical of Trump, such as Sasse, is so enthusiastic about confirming Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee.