Editor’s Note: Fox News reported Friday night that multiple sources say President Trump plans to announce that he will nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
American media spend a remarkable amount of time discussing the importance of diversity, but not when it comes to one of the country’s least represented groups: conservative women.
Despite the fact an estimated 27 million women voted for President Trump in 2016 and 28 million women voted for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, conservative women remain largely underrepresented in the federal government.
Only 101 women serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, 23 percent of the total, and just 13 are members of the Republican Party. Further, of the 26 women holding seats in the U.S. Senate, only nine are in the GOP.
Even worse, the history of conservative women on the Supreme Court is essentially nonexistent. Only four women have ever served on the bench of the nation’s highest court—Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—and only one, O’Connor, was appointed by a Republican president (Ronald Reagan).
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Most legal scholars today recognize that O’Connor was, unfortunately, not nearly as conservative as many Republicans had hoped she would be at the time of her appointment. Upon retiring, she was widely considered a judicial “moderate” and sided on numerous occasions with the Supreme Court’s liberal wing. That means a conservative woman has never served on the Supreme Court.
The death of Justice Ginsburg provides an important opportunity for President Trump to fill the now-empty ninth Supreme Court seat with a woman who firmly believes the Constitution should be interpreted based on the intent of those who wrote it and with the meaning of the words used at the time of a constitutional provision’s passage, a view held by millions of American women.
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Thankfully, it appears President Trump is strongly considering appointing a woman to fill the current vacancy. Trump has said that he intends to appoint a conservative woman, a decision he will announce Saturday evening at 5 p.m. could announce as early as this weekend.
Although no one knows who Trump will pick, it has been widely reported that Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and Barbara Lagoa, a woman serving on the bench of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, are currently two of the frontrunners.
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Of course, no one should be chosen for a position, especially one with as much importance as a Supreme Court seat, purely on the basis of gender. But it’s perfectly reasonable for gender to be one of several considerations, and the fact that conservative women—and women in general, for that matter—have received so little representation on the Supreme Court, despite having such a large presence in the country, shows that a conservative female justice is long overdue.
For decades, liberal, progressive, and socialist women have been given a much larger microphone than conservative women, giving the false impression that conservatism is an ideology belonging only to men. But that’s simply not true.
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Some of the most talented, intelligent, fierce people in the conservative movement today are women, and tens of millions of women vote for conservative candidates for office every election. They deserve to have better representation, both in Congress and in the halls of the Supreme Court.
Filling Justice Ginsburg’s seat with a pro-liberty woman would not solve the imbalances that exist in Congress and the Supreme Court entirely, of course, but it would be a big step in the right direction.
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