Gov. Ned Lamont’s nomination of a state Supreme Court justice stood in jeopardy Tuesday amid a firestorm of controversy over abortion and her experience.
Lawmakers were still raising questions about federal prosecutor Sandra Slack Glover on the day after she faced nearly seven hours of sometimes-intense questioning from the legislature’s judiciary committee.
Traditionally, a judicial nominee by a Democratic governor is virtually guaranteed confirmation when fellow Democrats control both chambers of the legislature. Relatively few judicial nominees have been blocked over the past 30 years in Hartford, although there have been exceptions.
But top lawmakers said that no vote is scheduled yet on Glover in the judiciary committee or in either chamber of the legislature. In addition, lawmakers would not publicly predict that Glover has the votes necessary for confirmation.
The main reason is that Glover signed a 2017 letter supporting conservative Amy Coney Barrett to become a federal appeals court judge — long before Barrett became known as one of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned the Roe vs. Wade decision in one of the most controversial judicial rulings in American history.
Glover apologized this week for signing the letter and told the judiciary committee that she is a strong supporter of abortion rights.
“In 2017, I was scared like everybody else,” Glover told the committee. “I went to Washington the day of the inauguration for the women’s march. Because I was scared. But I also believed, clearly naively at this point, that there were guardrails. And I thought they would hold. And I thought that lower court judges were constrained. I thought the Supreme Court was constrained. But I was wrong. Looking back, I now know I shouldn’t have signed it.”
House Speaker Matt Ritter of Hartford, one of the top vote-counters at the Capitol, said he will be speaking to his caucus members in the coming days to gauge their support before making any decisions about calling for a vote. But some lawmakers view the signing of the letter as inexcusable.
“That letter has really impacted a lot of people’s thoughts on that,” Ritter told reporters Tuesday. “I know she regrets it, and I’m sure she wishes that she never signed it. But there are some people who can’t get over that. Politics is a lot of luck and timing, whether you are running for higher office or getting appointed. Given what happened with [the court’s abortion decision] and the timeliness of all that, it’s just really emotional, and a lot of us can understand and respect that position, too. It’s hard.”
Deputy House Speaker pro tem Robert Godfrey, one of the longest-serving lawmakers, said it is “very rare” for him to vote against a potential judge over the past 35 years in the legislature.
“She’s very proud of the fact that she marched in the women’s march in 2017,” Godfrey said. “Then, a few weeks later, she signs the letter. Hypocrisy may be too strong a word, but it raises the question: where are you coming from and where are you planning to go? It’s a puzzle.”
Godfrey was stunned when Glover used unusually strong language to declare her support for abortion rights and blasted the Dobbs abortion decision as “egregious” in the same way that Justice Samuel Alito had denounced the Roe decision as “egregiously wrong” when he wrote the Dobbs decision.
“It’s unusual, if not something that never happens, for a nominee to talk about how they would rule on a case,” Godfrey said. “She talked at great length on Dobbs and the abortion issue.”
But Godfrey said Glover declined to talk about other issues that might arise when she is on the bench.
“Well, you either can’t talk about them all — you can’t be selective,” Godfrey said. “It just raised more questions. … There’s too many blanks. There’s too many missing pieces, and this is the Supreme Court. This is not somebody doing traffic tickets. This is important.”
During the public hearing, state Rep. Melissa Osborne, an attorney from Simsbury who supports abortion rights, agreed with Republican Rep. Craig Fishbein that lawmakers had little understanding of Glover’s views because she has never served as a judge. Glover, 52, of Guilford works for the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven and has headed appeals in both criminal and civil cases for the past 14 years. She does not have extensive experience with state law, raising concern among some lawmakers. She was recommended for the position by Nora Dannehy, a former longtime federal prosecutor who served as Lamont’s chief counsel before heading to private practice.
“Certainly, we need to basically understand what your gut is,” Osborne said during the hearing. “What is your gut instinct that you’re going to bring to things, and we don’t have any illumination into that. When you say that policy is a legislative decision, I disagree with that a lot because I realize policy is frequently made by courts and especially by the Supreme Court.”
But Lamont strongly defended Glover on Tuesday, saying she had performed well under intense questioning by the judiciary committee.
“I thought she was great,” Lamont said when asked by The Courant. “I thought she showed she has the qualifications to be a really strong Supreme Court justice … starting with being pro-choice and celebrating diversity and all the reasons you want the Supreme Court to protect our freedoms. But let’s face it. She’s not from the usual suspects. She comes from a little bit of a different background. That’s one of the things I liked about Sandy. … People want to get to know her better, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Lamont noted that the letter in favor of Barrett was signed by more than 30 judicial clerks from the class of 1998, including those for both conservative and liberal justices that included those working for liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett had been a clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, while Glover served as a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The letter said that Barrett was “fully qualified” to sit on the federal appeals court in Illinois before she was nominated by President Donald J. Trump for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Everybody signed onto this,” Lamont said of the 2017 letter. “It wasn’t an endorsement, but it was a statement about qualifications. … It wasn’t that big a red flag early on.”
Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com
