Amy Coney Barrett is not ‘wildly’ out of mainstream: Brit Hume

With Judge Amy Coney Barrett's name on President Trump's short list to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it's going to be a "very intense" process, Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume argued Monday night.

The intensity of the Supreme Court nomination hearings has only grown since the "legally shaky" right to abortion began in Roe v. Wade and the real fear that it might go away has "animated these Supreme Court battles ever since," Hume told "Fox News @ Night."

"I go back to Bork and Clarence Thomas and so on and character assassination has been the order of the day for a number of these nominations, particularly when it was felt that this was a justice that might tip the balance of the court or a potential justice that might tip the balance of the court one way or the other or at least to the right," he added.

"In this case with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, leader of the liberal wing of the court now gone, subject to being replaced by a conservative jurist, I think it’s going to be very intense, indeed," Hume said.

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He responded to criticism from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who called Barrett wildly out of the mainstream Monday night after the president reportedly met with her earlier in the day. Trump over the weekend said he wanted to pick a woman.

"What Sen. Schumer said, now that’s just a wild exaggeration," Hume said. "Judge Barrett isn't someone who is wildly out of the mainstream."

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Barrett's confirmation as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017 was contentious, with several Democratic senators questioning her Catholic faith.

When Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said, "The dogma lives loudly within you, and that's a concern," Hume explained, "the complaint that you heard from Dianne Feinstein was basically simply this: You take your religious faith too seriously as if that is now a vice in contemporary America."

Barrett, a former law clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia from 1998 to 1999, responded: "It's never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law."

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"[The left thinks] people of faith are to be feared," Hume said, but noted "the distinction between what you would do in your personal life and how you would conduct yourself and the integrity you would display, is one thing, and one hopes that would spill over into your public life but not necessarily into your judicial decisions if you’re a judge."

Host Shannon Bream added, "But certainly treating people with fairness and with justice and with love and mercy which we all have been given."

Fox News' Evie Fordham contributed to this report