WASHINGTON • US President Donald Trump is moving towards nominating Ms Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, according to people familiar with the matter, despite the President saying on Monday he is considering as many as five candidates.
Ms Barrett, 48, had a meeting with Mr Trump and also separately met White House Counsel Pat Cipollone on Monday, said people familiar with the discussions.
She is a favourite of anti-abortion rights advocates, who are heavily lobbying the White House and Mr Trump personally to nominate her. She is preferred by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to people close to him.
And her supporters have pointed out to the White House that as a Midwestern Catholic, Ms Barrett may help the President secure votes for his re-election in vital Rust Belt and Great Lakes states where he currently trails Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Mr Trump told an audience in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday that he would pick a woman. Earlier, he told reporters at the White House he is looking at "five women" to fill the vacancy but has "one or two" of them in mind as finalists. The President said Ms Barrett is among those under consideration.
Asked if he would meet all five of his candidates in person, Mr Trump said: "I don't know, I doubt it. We'll meet with a few, probably."
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the President's Supreme Court candidate meetings.
Within the White House, the only candidate for Ms Ginsburg's seat currently attracting serious interest other than Ms Barrett is Appeals Court Judge Barbara Lagoa.
She is a Cuban-American from Florida, as Mr Trump has repeatedly noted, which might help him in that must-win state.
But Ms Lagoa is at the moment a distant second to Ms Barrett, a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals based in Chicago.
Mr Trump has expressed some scepticism about her conservative credentials because Ms Lagoa drew the votes of 27 Democrats when she was confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, people familiar with the matter said.
Still, the process has been fast moving and the President could change his mind before an announcement is made.
If either Ms Barrett or Ms Lagoa is nominated and confirmed, six out of nine Supreme Court justices would be Catholic, in a country where Catholics make up only about 20 per cent of the population in the United States, the America Magazine reported.
Mr Trump is set to light off a furious political battle over the Supreme Court seat vacated by Ms Ginsburg's death last Friday, only about six weeks before he stands for re-election.
The prospect that he will replace the liberal icon with a conservative jurist has outraged Democrats, who responded by pouring more than US$120 million (S$163 million) into the party's fund-raising platform ActBlue over the weekend.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told colleagues that "nothing is off the table" if Republicans vote for Ms Ginsburg's replacement and Democrats take the White House and Senate in November.
Democrats are increasingly talking up the possibility of adding justices to the apex court as a possible response.
Mr Trump has told allies that he thinks Ms Barrett is a smart, hard-nosed, conservative jurist who would also come across well during televised confirmation hearings, according to one of the people.
Ms Barrett was one of Mr Trump's finalists in 2018 when he was looking for a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy.
The President instead nominated Mr Brett Kavanaugh, but Ms Barrett's allies were told by White House staff at the time that she was being saved for the next round of possible nominees.
Mr Trump tweeted yesterday he would announce his pick at the White House on Saturday.
A practising Catholic and the mother of seven children, including two adopted from Haiti and a young son with Down syndrome, Ms Barrett is personally opposed to abortion, one of the key issues dominating the cultural divide in the US.
After a childhood in New Orleans in the conservative south, she became a top student at Notre Dame law school in Indiana where she later went on to teach for 15 years.
At the beginning of her legal career, she clerked for the renowned conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and took up his "originalist" philosophy of understanding the Constitution as it was meant to be read at the time it was written, as opposed to more progressive interpretation.
Praised for her finely honed legal arguments, the university professor nevertheless has limited experience of actually presiding over a courtroom, having taken to the Bench only in 2017, after being appointed by Mr Trump as a federal appeals court judge.
BLOOMBERG, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
