Senate hearing for Judge Amy Coney Barrett kicked off on Monday, with Republicans and Democrats posing their views for or against the conservative Judge’s lifetime appointment as Supreme Court justice.

Barrett was picked by Donald Trump on September 26 as a replacement for liberal and woman’s rights champion justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, after her death. 

The Senate, which is dominated by the Republicans at present, is tasked by law to approve nominations to the country’s apex court. The conservatives currently occupy five out of nine seats in the Supreme Court.

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Here is everything to know about Judge Amy Cody Barett.

Appointed for the first time in 2017, Barret, 48, is a judge on the seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago and is considered a favourite among social conservatives. She is a practicing Catholic and law professor.

If elected Barrett will be the only conservative woman in the Supreme Court. The two other women justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor are both progressives appointed by former President Barack Obama.

The 48-year-old conservative was a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative pillar of the Supreme Court until his death in February 2016. During her clerkship days the was called “The Conenator” by her colleagues “for destroying flimsy legal arguments,” NPR reported. In law journals, she has professed opinions heavily influenced, according to her critics, by traditional religious values.

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In her three years as a federal judge, Barrett has written over 100 opinions and “several telling dissents in which Barrett displayed her clear and consistent conservative bent,” The Associated Press noted of her judicial record.

From guns to abortion and sexual assault on campus to health care, Barrett has shown herself to be a conservative jurist.