(CNN)President Donald Trump on Saturday said he is nominating Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative federal appeals court judge, to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the US Supreme Court, setting off a fierce partisan battle in the waning days of a hotly contested presidential election.
Calling it a “very proud moment indeed,” Trump called Barrett a woman of “towering intellect” and “unyielding loyalty to the Constitution” who would rule “based solely on the fair reading of the law.”
In a flag-bedecked Rose Garden designed to mimic Ginsburg’s own nomination ceremony in 1993, Trump recounted Barrett’s educational and professional background, noted her seven children and hailed her ties to another late Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked.
“I looked and I studied and you are very eminently qualified for this job,” Trump told his nominee. “You are going to be fantastic.”
Barrett, Trump declared before an audience that included Scalia’s widow, Republican senators and several figures from the conservative media, is “one of our nation’s most brilliant and gifted legal minds.”
In her own remarks, Barrett offered only a glimpse of what type of justice she would be and did not delve into specifics.
“A judge must apply the law as written,” she said. “Judges are not policy makers.”
Instead she sought to cast herself as a public servant — one who, at 48, could potentially serve on the court for decades.
“If confirmed, I would not assume that role for the sake of those in my own circle, and certainly not for my own sake, I would assume this role to serve you,” she said.
