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CHICAGO (AP) — President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee has made clear in her academic writings that she's at least open to reversing some long-established precedents, possibly including the Roe v. Wade ruling that entrenched women's abortion rights. Amy Coney Barrett in a 2013 Texas Law Review article described precedent as a "soft" high-court rule and not "an inexorable command." She added that "legal culture" has never "treated the reversal of precedent as out-of-bounds." But Barrett has also sometimes struck a pragmatic chord, warning that reversing precedents could shatter trust in the Supreme Court.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Records show Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett previously lived in a house owned by co-founders of a religious community, People of Praise, that teaches men are divinely ordained as the “heads” of both family and faith. Barrett lived with Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan in the mid-1990s, when she was a law student at the University of Notre Dame. The couple helped found People of Praise in the early 1970s. The secretive group is opposed to the legal right to an abortion.
An old directory for the Christian organization People of Praise members shows Barrett served as a “handmaid.” That's the term used at the time for high-ranking female leaders in the religious community. Barrett has refused to discuss her membership in the People of Praise. The organization opposes abortion and holds that men are divinely ordained as the “head” of both the family and faith, and that it's the duty of wives to obey them. Former members have alleged the group subjugates women. Barrett's leadership role in People of Praise is likely to be raised as an issue next week when a Senate committee considers her nomination.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are calling on the Justice Department to provide any missing materials from a questionnaire completed by Barrett. Barrett signed a 2006 newspaper ad sponsored by an anti-abortion group in which she said she opposed “abortion on demand” and defended “the right to life from fertilization to the end of natural life.” The ad was not included in materials Barrett provided to the Judiciary Committee for her pending Supreme Court nomination nor for her 2017 nomination as a federal appeals court judge. Democratic lawmakers are asking the Justice Department whether other material was omitted from the Senate questionnaire.
