President Trump said on Tuesday that Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s personal views on abortion had not come up in their private discussions before he was announced as Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court.
“No, I haven’t. I really haven’t,” Trump told reporters at the White House when asked whether he’d discussed the topic with Kavanaugh.
The president announced Monday evening that he was nominating Kavanaugh to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom the conservative D.C. federal appellate judge previously clerked.
The possibility of overturning the 1973 landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade took center stage in the days leading up to Trump’s announcement, with both sides of the abortion debate anxiously waiting to see if the new justice could tilt the court to the right enough to overturn the decision.
Kavanaugh, a Catholic, dissented in a recent case that allowed an undocumented minor in government detention to obtain an abortion, saying the court had invented “a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in US government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.”
However, he told Senator Chuck Schumer during his confirmation hearing to the D.C. Circuit that he would “follow Roe v. Wade faithfully and fully,” because he viewed it as “binding precedent of the court.”
Democrats have made abortion rights their main point of opposition to Kavanaugh and sounded the alarm on the possibility that he will vote to overturn Roe.
“With this pick, the president is making good on his pledge to ‘punish’ women for their choices,” Schumer said in a statement. “Judge Kavanaugh got the nomination because he passed this litmus test.”
“I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have, and I hope a bipartisan majority will do the same,” the Senate minority leader added.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called the nomination a “clear and disrespectful assault on the fundamental rights of women” and said it will “radically reverse the course of American justice and democracy.”
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