Chris Wallace Calls Debate ‘a Terrible Missed Opportunity’ - The New York Times

Chris Wallace Calls Debate ‘a Terrible Missed Opportunity’



By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUMnytimes.com4 min



The veteran anchor conceded he was initially “reluctant” to step in during the Trump-Biden matchup. “I’ve never been through anything like this,” he said.



“I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,” Chris Wallace, the moderator of the first presidential debate, said on Wednesday.

“I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,” Chris Wallace, the moderator of the first presidential debate, said on Wednesday.



“I’m just sad with the way last night turned out.”



Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” anchor and moderator of Tuesday’s melee of a debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., was on the phone Wednesday from his home in Annapolis, Md., reflecting on — his words — “a terrible missed opportunity.”



“I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,” he said.



In his first interview since the chaotic and often incoherent spectacle — in which a pugilistic Mr. Trump relentlessly interrupted opponent and moderator alike — Mr. Wallace conceded that he had been slow to recognize that the president was not going to cease flouting the debate’s rules.



“I’ve read some of the reviews. I know people think, well, gee, I didn’t jump in soon enough,” Mr. Wallace said, his voice betraying some hoarseness from the previous night’s proceedings. “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.”



Recalling his thoughts as he sat onstage in the Cleveland hall, with tens of millions of Americans watching live, Mr. Wallace said: “I’m a pro. I’ve never been through anything like this.”



Mr. Trump’s bullying behavior had no obvious precedent in presidential debates, even the one that Mr. Wallace previously moderated, to acclaim, in 2016. In the interview, the anchor said that when Mr. Trump initially engaged directly with Mr. Biden, “I thought this was great — this is a debate!”



But as the president gave no sign of backing off, Mr. Wallace said, he grew more alarmed. “If I didn’t try to seize control of the debate — which I don’t know that I ever really did — then it was going to just go completely off the tracks,” he said.



Asked what he was feeling when he called the debate to a temporary halt — instructing the candidates that “the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions” — Mr. Wallace said, “The answer to that question is easy: Desperation.”



Asked directly if Mr. Trump had derailed the debate, Mr. Wallace replied, “Well, he certainly didn’t help.”



Care to elaborate? “No,” Mr. Wallace said. “To quote the president, ‘It is what it is.’”



In the spotlight, Mr. Wallace was keenly aware of the complexity of his task: ensuring an evenhanded debate, avoiding taking sides, allowing candidates to express themselves while keeping the discussion substantive.



“You’re reluctant — as somebody who has said from the very beginning that I wanted to be as invisible as possible, and to enable them to talk — to rise to the point at which you begin to interject more and more,” Mr. Wallace said. “First to say, ‘Please don’t interrupt,’ then ‘Please obey the rules,’ and third, ‘This isn’t serving the country well.’ Those are all tough steps at real time, at that moment, on that stage.”



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The Commission on Presidential Debates said on Wednesday that it would examine changes to the format of this year’s remaining encounters between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, a clear sign of its frustration with the results of Tuesday evening. The commission also took pains to praise Mr. Wallace for his “professionalism and skill.”



The suggestion that moderators be given the power to mute the candidates’ microphones — popular on social media in the hours after the event — did not sit well with Mr. Wallace.



“As a practical matter, even if the president’s microphone had been shut, he still could have continued to interrupt, and it might well have been picked up on Biden’s microphone, and it still would have disrupted the proceedings in the hall,” he said.



And he noted that cutting off the audio feed of a presidential candidate is a more consequential act than some pundits give it credit for. “People have to remember, and too many people forget, both of these candidates have the support of tens of millions of Americans,” he said.



Steve Scully of C-SPAN is set to moderate the next debate, in a town-hall format where Florida voters will ask many of the questions. Kristen Welker of NBC News is the moderator for the final debate. Mr. Wallace’s advice: “If either man goes down this road, I hope you’ll be quicker to realize what’s going on than I was. I didn’t have that advance warning.”



Mr. Wallace flew home from Cleveland on Tuesday night. At an airport there, he accepted a glass of champagne from Lachlan Murdoch, whose family controls the Fox Corporation, and Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News, both of whom had been on hand for the debate. (“I didn’t feel much like celebrating,” Mr. Wallace admitted.)



Back in Annapolis, “I’ve been involved in a certain amount of soul-searching.”



“Generally speaking, I did as well as I could, so I don’t have any second thoughts there,” Mr. Wallace said, in conclusion. “I’m just disappointed with the results. For me, but much more importantly, I’m disappointed for the country, because it could have been a much more useful evening than it turned out to be.”



Chris Wallace Calls Debate ‘a Terrible Missed Opportunity’ - The New York Times

Black residents nearly four times as likely to be cited by Los Angeles police, report finds | US news | The Guardian

Police officers arrest a man in Los Angeles. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) gave 63% of its citations for “loitering while standing” to Black residents in recent years, despite African Americans making up just 7% of the city’s population, a new analysis of public records has revealed.

A report released on Wednesday by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights analyzed low-level infractions in California between 2017 and 2019 and found that LAPD and police agencies across the state disproportionately target Black residents. The advocacy group collected data on the most minor municipal offenses and tickets (outside of traffic citations) – including standing or sleeping outside, owning a dog without a proper license, jaywalking and entering a park after dark – and found a pattern of severe racial disparities in major cities and regions throughout the state.

Key findings include:

• Overall, Black residents in California are 9.7 times more likely to receive a citation for local infractions than white residents in their jurisdictions, and Latinx residents were 5.8 times more likely to be cited than their white neighbors.
• Black residents in LA were 3.8 times more likely to be cited for minor infractions compared with white residents, accounting for 30% of all low-level infractions.
• Despite being only 7% of the adult population, Black Angelenos accounted for 27% of “drinking in public infractions”, 33% of “sleeping or sitting” loitering tickets; and 63% of “loitering while standing” citations.
• There were similar patterns of disparate treatment of Black residents in liberal and more conservative regions of the state, including in the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Kern county, San Diego and other municipalities.

The report comes amid growing scrutiny of police violence and harassment, with advocates arguing that the enforcement of these offenses can lead to brutal and even deadly interactions with officers. The citations also disproportionately target unhoused people, and can lead to devastating fines and debts that can escalate to warrants, arrests and jail time.

The analysis suggests that in some neighborhoods and communities, “it’s illegal to be Black in public”, said Elisa Della-Piana, legal director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR) of the San Francisco Bay area, and co-author of the report. “It causes lasting trauma, especially to be stopped repeatedly by police when you were doing nothing wrong, as is the case with ‘loitering’ and ‘sleeping’.”

People are regularly fined between $250 and $500 for these types of offenses, and the state currently has more than $10bn in uncollected infraction debts, meaning thousands of people could face arrest due to these minor violations, LCCR said. While some jurisdictions use these laws to target homeless residents, other municipalities enforce these ordinances as a way to collect revenue, according to the report.

“What started as, ‘I’m here in a public space minding my own business not harming anyone’, can quickly become a trap that causes financial and physical harm,” Della-Piana said, adding that she was struck by the comparable trends in different parts of California: “There are similarities across the state in how banal the behaviors are that we’re punishing with very serious consequences.”

In Long Beach, south of LA, Black residents face significantly higher rates of citations for jaywalking, riding a bike on a sidewalk, and smoking at a bus stop, for example. (A spokesperson for the department said “racial profiling is unacceptable and against the law and our policies”, and noted that the city was reviewing enforcement trends as part of a racial equity initiative.)

In Modesto in the Central Valley, a majority of dog-related citations appeared to go to Latinx residents, even though they are a minority in the city.

Between 2017 and 2019 in Hayward, east of San Francisco, every single citation for marijuana possession was to a person of color, the majority of them Black, despite the fact that white people comprise 34% of the population and Black residents 11.9%. (Marijuana possession is legal in California, but not for people under 21, which is probably why these citations are still happening.)

Often the disparities are a result of officers overpolicing Black and immigrant communities, Della-Piana said. In LA in particular, there have been numerous recent examples of the potential deadly consequences. Last month, two deputies with the Los Angeles sheriff’s department fatally shot a bicyclist, 29-year-old Dijon Kizzee, who was fleeing after officers tried to stop him for allegedly riding in the wrong direction.

LAPD and other police agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report. In the face of data analyses last year showing significant disparities in stops and searches, LA police and city leaders argued that aggregated data does “not define or describe the circumstances of each stop or search” or “prove” racial profiling, and pointed to reform efforts, such as implicit bias training.

Activists, however, say these ordinances for minor violations are rooted in racist laws and anti-homeless policies passed with the explicit purpose of targeting certain demographics.

As calls to “defund police” have continued to spread since George Floyd’s death, Della-Piana said she hoped local legislators would look at this category of citations as a starting point. “This is a really straightforward place to say there should not be police contact, and we should not risk police violence over this kind of everyday behavior. We can repeal these laws.”

Black residents nearly four times as likely to be cited by Los Angeles police, report finds | US news | The Guardian

'Fox & Friends' hosts and guests offer President Trump debate advice - The Washington Post

'Fox & Friends' hosts and guests offer President Trump debate advice - The Washington Post

Stephen Colbert's LIVE Monologue After The First Trump-Biden Presidentia....

Proud Boys celebrate Trump’s ‘stand by’ remark about them at the debate. - The New York Times

"Members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, celebrated on Tuesday night after President Trump mentioned them during the first presidential debate.

Asked whether he condemned white supremacists and military groups, Mr. Trump demurred and then said, “Proud Boys — stand back and stand by.”

Within minutes, members of the group were posting in private social media channels, calling the president’s comments “historic.” In one channel dedicated to the Proud Boys on Telegram, a private messaging app, group members called the president’s comment a tacit endorsement of their violent tactics.

In another message, a member commented that the group was already seeing a spike in “new recruits.”

Mr. Trump’s rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., noted that the group was celebrating Mr. Trump’s remark, pointing in a retweet to some of the comments being made.When asked what Mr. Trump meant by “stand by,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the president’s campaign, said it was “very clear he wants them to knock it off.”

The Proud Boys describe themselves as “a pro-Western fraternal organization for men.” The group has openly endorsed violence, and has recently been tied to several violent incidents at recent protests.

The Proud Boys were formed in 2016 by Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice Media. Mr. McInnes said in an interview in November 2018 that he was “quitting” the Proud Boys.

Several civil rights groups have condemned the Proud Boys, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies them as a hate group, and the Anti-Defamation League, which refers to them as “hard-core white supremacists.”

Twitter suspended the Proud Boys from its platform in August 2018, and Facebook followed with a similar ban in October 2018. In the years since, the group has continued to expand its numbers on other social media platforms, and has become more visible at protests."

Proud Boys celebrate Trump’s ‘stand by’ remark about them at the debate. - The New York Times

Trump Interrupts To Point Of Chaos In First Debate | FiveThirtyEight Pol...

Trump on Biden's late son: "I don't know Beau"

Vote like your life depends on it. It may!

Biden campaign slams Facebook for ‘regression’ on false Trump claims

"Biden campaign slams Facebook for ‘regression’ on false Trump claims

Facebook’s promises are ‘nothing more than an excuse for inaction’

Adi RobertsonSep 29, 2020, 11:06am EDT

Joe Biden’s campaign has denounced Facebook for allowing President Donald Trump to spread false information about voting, calling Facebook’s moderation a “regression” from promises it made earlier this month. Biden’s letter, first reported by Axios and obtained by The Verge, pushes CEO Mark Zuckerberg to remove posts where Trump baselessly cast doubt on mail-in ballots and encouraged citizens to vote twice.

“We were told then that Facebook was working to determine how best to apply its new, more aggressive approach” to fighting voting misinformation, reads the letter from campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon. “Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression. Facebook’s continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction.”

“Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression.”

The Biden campaign previously published an open letter to Facebook in June, asking the company to remove false information and enforce its rules against voter suppression. Since then, Facebook has launched a voter information hub and announced that it will stop accepting political ads before the US presidential election. But its attempts to label Trump’s voting-related posts have often stopped at offering generic election information, not actually fact-checking the messages. 

Facebook has pledged to remove content that contains “implicit misrepresentations about voting,” as well as “calls for coordinated interference” in elections. The Biden campaign argues that multiple Trump posts violate these policies, as well as one from Donald Trump Jr., who called for Trump supporters to join an “army” to stop the addition of “millions of fraudulent ballots” to election results. (There is no evidence of plans to submit fraudulent anti-Trump ballots.) “No company that considers itself a force for good in democracy, and that purports to take voter suppression seriously, would allow this dangerous claptrap to be spread to millions of people. Removing this video should have been the easiest of easy calls under your policies, yet it remains up today.”

In a statement given to PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, Facebook appeared noncommittal. “While many Republicans think we should take one course, many Democrats think we should do the exact opposite,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We have rules in place to protect the integrity of the election and free expression, and we will continue to apply them impartially.” The statement doesn’t note whether Trump’s posts violate Facebook’s rules, and — if they do — why they haven’t been removed."

Biden campaign slams Facebook for ‘regression’ on false Trump claims

Census Update: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Our Moment

Our Moment

Global coronavirus deaths pass 1m with no sign rate is slowing | World news | The Guardian

Global coronavirus deaths pass 1m with no sign rate is slowing | World news | The Guardian

The Supreme Court: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO).

The Supreme Court: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO).

Le Creimos

NYT obtains two decades of Trump’s tax returns revealing years of tax avoidance

NYT obtains two decades of Trump’s tax returns revealing years of tax avoidance

Opinion | Why Chadwick Boseman’s fight for African accents in ‘Black Panther’ was so important

"In an emotional tribute to actor Chadwick Boseman, who passed away on Friday at the age of 43, director Ryan Coogler revealed the moment that he knew he wanted to make “Black Panther.” It was while watching Boseman act in an unfinished cut of “Captain America: Civil War” — speaking his lines in Xhosa with South African actor John Kani.

“Chad and John began conversing in a language I had never heard before,” Coogler said. “It sounded familiar, full of the same clicks and smacks that young black children would make in the States. The same clicks that we would often be chided for being disrespectful or improper. But, it had a musicality to it that felt ancient, powerful, and African.”

Boseman’s commitment to speaking Xhosa on camera was one of the reasons Coogler signed on to direct the film. It was just one way Boseman helped show that centering Africanness — putting African aesthetics, language and accents front and center — is a fight worth having.

It was only after his death that the world learned that Boseman had been fighting colon cancer for four years, including while playing T’Challa. Alongside his health battles, he was fighting Marvel itself to ensure Africa wasn’t presented through a colonial lens. In 2018, he told the Hollywood Reporter that Marvel initially thought that the accents would be “too much.” “I felt the exact opposite — like, if I speak with a British accent, what’s gonna happen when I go home? It felt to me like a deal-breaker,” he said. “I was like, ‘No, this is such an important factor that if we lose this right now, what else are we gonna throw away for the sake of making people feel comfortable?”

In choosing to fight for African accents, Boseman was fighting against the legacies of colonialism. The fictional kingdom of Wakanda is supposed to be a powerful African nation, one that is self-sufficient — a representation of what could have been if African nations had not been colonized and plundered for their resources by outside powers. Marvel would have undermined one of the central motifs of “Black Panther” if it had gotten its way and forced its actors to adopt British accents, to mimic the tongue of one of Africa’s most powerful colonizers.

Boseman worked with a dialect coach for his role, to take on a Xhosa accent to match the heritage of Kani, who played his father, T’Chaka, in the films. Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o spoke in her native Kenyan accent. The other accents were “all over the place” as Kenyan journalist Larry Madowo said at the time. “They wanted to base the accents on Xhosa from South Africa, but some of it sounded Nigerian, others sounded more Ugandan. It was very confusing, and I understand perfecting an accent is difficult, but oh, my goodness, it was so messy!”

As a first-generation American with roots in Ghana, I recognize what Boseman did to champion a fantasy rendering of Africanness on a big screen may have been messy to our ears. But it was important for global Black culture. Back in 2009, when I lived in Accra, Ghana, as a media researcher, I remember attending radio journalism classes where the instructors lectured aspiring radio presenters in the class to approximate the accent of Queen’s English. (The instructors tried to correct my American accent, too). The message they were sending was clear: To be seen as authoritative, respectable, worthy of being listened to, you needed to speak in the same accent as the very people who helped to subjugate Ghanaians.

“Black Panther” is proof that isn’t true. And today, more and more Black creators of African heritage are finding their way onto the big and small screen, and bringing African accents and languages with them.

It was affirming to see that, in the brilliant and provocative HBO series “I May Destroy You,” the main character, Arabella, played by the show’s writer and creator Michaela Coel, goes home to her Ghanaian household, where her mother speaks Twi and Twi-accented English. Arabella’s brother even teases her for not knowing enough of her own language. On television, the American sitcom “Bob Hearts Abishola” is about a White man who falls in love with a Nigerian nurse. My mother, who grew up in Nigeria, always tries to catch the show when it comes on, chuffed to see Nigerian accents and immigrant culture represented on an American sitcom.

“Black Panther” now holds its place in history as one of the most successful superhero movies of all time, grossing more than $1 billion in global box office sales. But to many of us, Boseman and Coogler’s artistic commitment to centering Africanness was the true victory. It’s why Boseman’s sudden death hurts so much in this moment. When icons and heroes pass on, it is always painful. But it feels especially cruel to lose Boseman so suddenly in a year in which the fight for Black life and against white supremacy has gone global.

Our Black Panther has gone to be with the ancestors. But we can take comfort that Boseman opened a portal, proving that future stories rooted in Africanness and Blackness deserve to be fought for."

Opinion | Why Chadwick Boseman’s fight for African accents in ‘Black Panther’ was so important

Opinion | Africa has defied the covid-19 nightmare scenarios. We shouldn’t be surprised. "While Black Americans have been disproportionately contracting covid-19 and dying, Africa’s performance shows, as I quoted a Kenyan anthropologist saying in May, “being a black person in this world doesn’t kill you, but being a black person in America clearly can.”

"While Black Americans have been disproportionately contracting covid-19 and dying, Africa’s performance shows, as I quoted a Kenyan anthropologist saying in May, “being a black person in this world doesn’t kill you, but being a black person in America clearly can.”



"Africa has defied the covid-19 nightmare scenarios. We shouldn’t be surprised.

Karen Attiah

A student wearing a face mask and shield returns to Melpark Primary School in Johannesburg last month.

A student wearing a face mask and shield returns to Melpark Primary School in Johannesburg last month. (Denis Farrell/AP)

After the novel coronavirus first appeared in Africa in late February, Ghana’s government decided it would take no chances. Ghanaian citizens were soon put under lockdown, and travel between major cities was banned. Then President Nana Akufo-Addo announced the closure of the country’s land and sea borders.

But after he got back to Texas, the number of cases there started to rise, and I joked with him that he would have been safer in Ghana. “Ghana is doing much better with this than America,” he had said after I picked him up from the airport, amused that I sprayed down the entire car with disinfectant before making him sit in the back seat, away from me.

News reports and opinion articles have posited that corruption and a lack of health-care infrastructure meant that Africa was a “time bomb” waiting to explode. Rampant poverty and a lack of effective governance would cause the dark continent to fall apart under the weight of a public health emergency. The world, the experts said, should prepare to offer aid, loans and debt forgiveness to African governments — in other words, they should prepare to save Africa.

While so much about the virus and how it operates remains unclear, sub-Saharan Africa so far has dodged a deadly wave of coronavirus cases. Many factors have contributed to this. A number of West African nations already had a pandemic response infrastructure in place from the Ebola outbreak of late 2013 to 2016. Just six years ago, Liberia lost nearly 5,000 people to Ebola. At the beginning of this year, Liberia began screening for covid-19 at airports. Travelers coming in from countries with more than 200 cases were quarantined. To date, Liberia, a country of some 5 million, has 1,335 cases and around 82 deaths.

After the Ebola pandemic, Senegal set up an emergency operations center to manage public health crises. Some covid-19 test results come back in 24 hours, and the country employs aggressive contact tracing. Every coronavirus patient is given a bed in hospital or other health-care facility. Senegal has a population of 16 million, but has only 302 registered deaths. Several countries have come up with innovations. Rwanda, a country of 12 million, also responded early and aggressively to the virus, using equipment and infrastructure that was in place to deal with HIV/AIDS. Testing and treatment for the virus are free. Rwanda has recorded only 26 deaths.



As the United States approaches 200,000 deaths, the West seems largely blind to Africa’s successes. In recent weeks, headline writers seem to be doing their hardest to try to reconcile Western stereotypes about Africa with the reality of the low death rates on the continent. The BBC came under fire for a since-changed headline and a tweet that read “Coronavirus in Africa: Could poverty explain mystery of low death rate?” The New York Post published an article with the headline, “Scientists can’t explain puzzling lack of coronavirus outbreaks in Africa.”



It’s almost as if they are disappointed that Africans aren’t dying en masse and countries are not collapsing. While Black Americans have been disproportionately contracting covid-19 and dying, Africa’s performance shows, as I quoted a Kenyan anthropologist saying in May, “being a black person in this world doesn’t kill you, but being a black person in America clearly can.”



This pandemic has coincided with a global movement challenging anti-Black racism and white supremacy. This should have been a moment for media outlets to challenge corrosive narratives about Africa and the idea that Africans are not capable of effective policy-making. We could be learning from the experiences that Africans and their governments have had with pandemics and viral diseases, including Ebola and AIDS.



Instead, the media has largely ignored the policy successes out of Africa. In doing so, Western media is reinforcing colonial narratives of Black inferiority and the inability of Black nations to govern themselves at all, much less govern better than resource-rich White nations."



Opinion | Africa has defied the covid-19 nightmare scenarios. We shouldn’t be surprised.

What to Know About Amy Coney Barrett's Views - The New York Times

"As an appeals court judge, Judge Barrett has issued opinions that have reflected those of her mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia, but with few of his occasional liberal rulings.

If Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, the court would move to the right, making compromise less likely and putting at risk the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.

WASHINGTON — Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, has compiled an almost uniformly conservative voting record in cases touching on abortion, gun rights, discrimination and immigration. If she is confirmed, she would move the court slightly but firmly to the right, making compromise less likely and putting at risk the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.

Judge Barrett’s judicial opinions, based on a substantial sample of the hundreds of cases that she has considered in her three years on the federal appeals court in Chicago, are marked by care, clarity and a commitment to the interpretive methods used by Justice Antonin Scalia, the giant of conservative jurisprudence for whom she worked as a law clerk from 1998 to 1999.

But while Justice Scalia’s methods occasionally drove him to liberal results, notably in cases on flag burning and the role of juries in criminal cases, Judge Barrett could be a different sort of justice.

“There may be fewer surprises from someone like her than there were from Justice Scalia,” said Brian T. Fitzpatrick, a former law clerk to the justice and a law professor at Vanderbilt University. “She is sympathetic to Justice Scalia’s methods, but I don’t get the sense that she is going to be a philosophical leader on how those methods should be executed.”

One area in which almost no one expects surprises is abortion. Mr. Trump has vowed to appoint justices ready to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. Groups opposing abortion have championed Judge Barrett’s nomination. And her academic and judicial writings have been skeptical of broad interpretations of abortion rights.

Judge Barrett will doubtless tell senators that the Roe decision is a settled precedent, as she did when Mr. Trump nominated her to the appeals court in 2017. And the Supreme Court may not hear a direct challenge to Roe anytime soon, preferring instead to consider cases that could chip away at abortion rights.

Should Judge Amy Coney Barrett be confirmed to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court would become more conservative.Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

But when the day comes, many of Judge Barrett’s supporters are convinced that she will not flinch. Justice Scalia wrote that the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion and that states should be allowed to decide the question for themselves. There is no reason to believe Judge Barrett disagrees.

Overruling a major precedent is no small undertaking, of course. But Judge Barrett has indicated that some precedents are more worthy of respect than others.

In a 2013 law review article, she examined the role of the doctrine of stare decisis, which is Latin for “to stand by things decided” and is shorthand for respect for precedent. The doctrine is, Judge Barrett wrote, “not a hard-and-fast rule in the court’s constitutional cases,” and she added that its power is diminished when the case under review is unpopular.

“The public response to controversial cases like Roe,” she wrote, “reflects public rejection of the proposition that stare decisis can declare a permanent victor in a divisive constitutional struggle.”

Professor Fitzpatrick said he was certain of one thing. “I’m sure she thinks that Roe v. Wade is not a well-reasoned Supreme Court decision,” he said. “The hard question is whether she would be willing to overturn it.”

Should Judge Barrett succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Republican appointees would outnumber Democratic ones by a 6-to-3 margin, and, based on their voting records, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, another Trump nominee, could replace Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. as the swing vote.

And the chief justice, who has occasionally voted with what had been a four-member liberal wing in cases on health care, abortion and immigration, would have less incentive to do so on a reconfigured court.

“He certainly is not going to want to be in dissent with the three liberals,” said David A. Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The chief justice has the power to assign the majority opinion, to himself or to an ally, but only when he is in the majority. To keep that power, he would have good reason to tack right.

“Between the assignment power and how good he is at writing opinions,” Professor Strauss said of the chief justice, “he can push decisions to be more to his liking in the majority than if he were writing a dissent.”

In the coming weeks, months and years, the Supreme Court may be called upon to weigh issues as varied and weighty as the presidential election, the fate of affirmative action, the structure of the administrative state and the role courts can play in addressing climate change. Judge Barrett had not written major opinions in any of those areas, and, in any event, the views expressed by appeals court judges do not always predict their positions when they are elevated to the Supreme Court.

Here is a look at some of Judge Barrett’s views in major cases on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and what they suggest about her impact if she is confirmed.

Abortion

Judge Barrett has considered three laws restricting abortions from her home state, Indiana. In all three cases, she expressed misgivings about earlier rulings from appeals judges that had struck down the laws.

In one case, her court let stand a ruling that threw out a law tightening the requirements for notifying the parents of minors seeking abortions. Judge Barrett was on the losing side, joining an opinion that the ruling was premature and that the law should have been allowed to go into effect to assess its actual impact.

Citing the “unsettled status of pre-enforcement challenges in the abortion context,” the opinion called on the full court to address the question. “Preventing a state statute from taking effect is a judicial act of extraordinary gravity in our federal structure,” the opinion said.

Justice Kavanaugh also took issue with such pre-enforcement challenges in a dissent in the Supreme Court’s most recent abortion case, which struck down a restrictive Louisiana law. In July, the Supreme Court sent the Indiana case back to the appeals court for reconsideration in light of the one from Louisiana.

Judge Barrett also joined a 2018 dissent concerning two other Indiana laws, one banning abortions sought solely because of the sex or disability of a fetus and the other requiring abortion providers to bury or cremate fetal remains. Both had been blocked by a three-judge panel.

“None of the court’s abortion decisions holds that states are powerless to prevent abortions designed to choose the sex, race and other attributes of children,” the dissent said. It added that the fetal remains law was entirely rational. “The panel has held invalid a statute that would be sustained had it concerned the remains of cats or gerbils,” the dissent said.

In 2019, the Supreme Court turned down the state’s appeal on the first law and upheld the fetal remains law.

During her confirmation hearings for the Seventh Circuit, Judge Barrett repeatedly insisted that a judge should not impose her personal convictions on the law. She also said several times that as an appeals court judge, she would follow Supreme Court precedent on abortion.

Video

Health Care

On Nov. 10, a week after Election Day, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act. If Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans have their way, Judge Barrett will be on the bench to hear the case.

Since Chief Justice Roberts joined the court’s four-member liberal wing to reject efforts to dismantle the law, the latest challenge appeared to have little chance of success while Justice Ginsburg was alive. Judge Barrett’s presence would add uncertainty, though many legal experts say that the challengers’ arguments, supported by the Trump administration, are more creative than convincing.

In a 2017 law review article written before she joined the appeals court, Judge Barrett was critical of Chief Justice Roberts’s 2012 opinion sustaining a central provision of the health care law. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” she wrote.

The new case was brought by Republican state officials, who argued that when Congress in 2017 zeroed out the penalty for failing to obtain health insurance, lawmakers doomed the entire law. Judge Barrett’s views on those arguments are unknown.

Gun Rights

In a 2019 dissent, Judge Barrett said she would have limited the sweep of a federal law forbidding people with felony convictions from owning guns. She drew on originalism, a legal theory championed by Justice Scalia that seeks to interpret the Constitution as it was originally understood.

But she appeared to have gone further than her former mentor, the author of the 2008 majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which established an individual right to own guns for self-defense in the home. “Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons.”

In her dissent, Judge Barrett wrote that the law forbidding people with felony convictions from owning guns should not apply when the crimes at issue were nonviolent.

“History does not support the proposition that felons lose their Second Amendment rights solely because of their status as felons,” she wrote. “But it does support the proposition that the state can take the right to bear arms away from a category of people that it deems dangerous.”

The Supreme Court has provided little guidance on the scope of the right to bear arms since the Heller decision. The four most conservative justices on the current court have written that they are eager to return to the subject, particularly given their view that many lower courts have treated gun rights as second-class rights.

In June, however, the court turned down some 10 appeals in Second Amendment cases. Since it takes only four votes to grant review, there is reason to think that the court’s conservative wing was unsure it could secure Chief Justice Roberts’s vote. Should Judge Barrett be confirmed, the court is likely to hear more Second Amendment cases.

Death Penalty

In 1998, writing with John H. Garvey, now the president of Catholic University of America, Judge Barrett suggested that Catholic judges should recuse themselves in some death penalty cases that might conflict with their religious beliefs.

At her 2017 confirmation hearing, she said that “I would recuse myself and not actually enter the order of execution” were she a trial court judge in a death penalty case. But she noted that she had assisted Justice Scalia in capital cases as a law clerk.

On the Seventh Circuit, she has voted to allow executions to proceed.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg, had urged their colleagues to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty. That project gained no traction, and the court’s conservative majority has shown impatience with many appeals from death row inmates.

Though Judge Barrett apparently has some reservations, there is no reason to think the court will change course on its support for capital punishment.

Discrimination

Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel last year, Judge Barrett revived a lawsuit from a student who had been suspended by Purdue University after a school discipline program found that he had committed sexual violence. “Purdue’s process,” she wrote, “fell short of what even a high school must provide to a student facing a days-long suspension.”

In a lengthy dissent in June, she said she would have overturned a trial court ruling blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to tighten the “public charge” rule, which allows officials to deny permanent legal status, also known as a green card, to immigrants who are likely to need public assistance.

“Litigation is not the vehicle for resolving policy disputes,” she wrote."

What to Know About Amy Coney Barrett's Views - The New York Times