Amy Coney Barrett grilled on Day 2 of Senate confirmation hearings

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., began her questioning by reminding the committee that the Senate should be passing coronavirus relief right now, not rushing a Supreme Court nomination in an election year. 

“I appreciate Judge, that you said you did not want to be a 'queen.' I would not mind being the queen around here, truth be known,” Klobuchar said, prompting a laugh from Barrett. “But you said that you would not let your views influence you and the like, but the truth is the Supreme Court rulings rule people's lives.”

Klobuchar then quoted Trump promising to appoint a justice who would overturn the Affordable Care Act and asked Barrett, “Do you think that we should take the president at his word when he says his nominee will do the right thing and overturn the Affordable Care Act?” 

“I can't really speak to what the president had said on Twitter,” Barrett said. “He has not said any of that to me. What I can tell you, as I have told your colleagues earlier today, is that no one has elicited any commitment in the case or brought up that commitment in the case. I am 100% committed to judicial Independence from political pressure.”

Klobuchar also quoted from an essay Barrett wrote disagreeing with Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority decision which upheld the Affordable Care Act. Barrett stood by her interpretation.

“One thing I want to clarify is you say that I criticized Chief Justice Roberts, and I don't attack people. It's just ideas,” Barrett said. “So it was designed to make a comment about his reasoning in that case, which as I have said before is consistent with the majority opinion characterizing it as a left plausible reading of the statute.”

Graham called the Senate Judiciary Committee back into session shortly after 12:45 p.m. 

There are fifteen senators remaining in this round. Each has 30 minutes to ask Barrett questions.

After three hours of questioning, Graham announced the Senate Judiciary Committee is in recess until 12:45 p.m. 

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., homed in on Barrett’s dissent in Kanter v. Barr, a gun rights case from 2019. Barrett was the lone dissenter when a Seventh Circuit panel majority rejected a Second Amendment challenge from a man, Ricky Kanter, found guilty of felony mail fraud and prohibited from possessing a gun under federal and Wisconsin law.

Barrett argued non-violent felons shouldn't be banned for life from gun ownership, writing in her dissent that the Second Amendment “confers an individual right, intimately connected with the natural right of self-defense and not limited to civic participation.”

Knowing this, Durbin asked Barrett about the differentiation she made in Kanter between felon voting rights and gun ownership.

“You are saying a felony should not disqualify Ricky [Kanter] from buying an AK-47 but using a felony conviction to deny them the right to vote is all right?” Durbin asked. 

Barrett answered confidently but provided little insight into what her Kanter decision might mean for future voting rights cases. 

“Senator, what I said was that the Constitution contemplates that states have the freedom to deprive felons of the right to vote. It is expressed in the constitutional text, but I expressed no view whether it was a good idea, whether states should do that. I didn't explore in that opinion because it was completely irrelevant to what limits, if any, there might be on a state's ability to curtail felon voting rights,” she said.