Today, pressing ahead in flagrant disregard of longstanding rules and procedures, Senate Republicans voted unanimously to advance the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court. Senate Democrats on the committee walked out from the vote in protest and were counted as absent. The nomination, which Senate Republicans are jamming through at breakneck speed, now moves on to a full Senate floor vote.
Judge Barrett could be confirmed as soon as Monday, October 26.
Rushing a U.S. Supreme Court nomination like this is reckless and just plain despicable. This has been an affront to our democracy and the will of the American people, 35.9 million of whom have already cast ballots and the majority of whom believe the next president should choose Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement. This shouldn’t even be happening.
Every Senator who will soon vote on this nomination has a choice to make; our democratic values or partisan ideology.
It is impossible for LGBTQ people to have confidence in Judge Barrett. During the hearings, she refused to answer questions about some of the most pressing issues facing our nation’s highest Court and refused to say whether she believed cases that are the backbone of the legal rights of LGBTQ people — such as Lambda Legal’s landmark case, Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized same-sex intimacy, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage — were correctly decided. She even used loaded and outdated language like "sexual preference," which is explicitly intended to erase our identities and deny the validity of our claim to equal protection under the law.
We can read between the lines of her coded language and what we’re reading isn’t good. Nothing we heard allayed our concerns, and much of what we heard raised red flags about what her confirmation will mean for the LGBTQ community.
