Amy Coney Barrett’s conservative credentials ought to be impeccable. The Supreme Court justice was appointed to her seat by President Donald Trump during his first term, and she provided one of the votes that overturned Roe v. Wade. But recent cases indicate she is not an automatic vote for the president’s priorities, and she is drawing the right’s scrutiny as a result.
Barrett may be the “crucial vote in Trump cases,” said The New York Times. She was the only one of three justices appointed by Trump who voted against his administration’s emergency request to freeze foreign aid, providing the critical margin in the 5-4 ruling against the president. The result suggested Trump cannot count on the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority to back “every element of his efforts to expand the authority of the executive branch.” That has enraged some conservatives. “The power has gone to her head,” said conservative podcaster Mark Levin.
Barrett’s vote on the foreign aid freeze “sparked a MAGA meltdown,” said The Daily Beast. Barrett, the lone woman conservative justice, is “another DEI hire,” said Trumpist influencer Mike Cernovich. Other influential activists on the Trumpist right echoed those criticisms. Barrett’s vote is “a big problem,” said journalist Eric Daugherty.
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Progressives “owe Justice Barrett an apology” because she is “clearly not in Trump’s pocket,” Dace Potas said at USA Today. Barrett often votes “independently of the conservative majority” despite being cast by Democrats as a hardcore conservative partisan during her confirmation process in 2020. Instead, she has demonstrated a “commitment to the law.” During the 2022 term, in fact, Barrett agreed with the court’s liberal justices “at the same rate or more often” than she did with Justice Samuel Alito in split-decision cases. She is as “favorable to the liberals on the court as Democrats could wish for.”
Barrett is a “terrific justice,” Charles C.W. Cooke said at National Review. She got the foreign aid ruling “wrong,” but “that’s going to happen from time to time with judges who refuse to be drones.” There is no evidence that she is hostile to Trump, or that she’s a “coward or a squish” on conservative issues. She helped kill Roe, was a key vote in ending affirmative action in university enrollment and has ruled in favor of gun rights. She is, however, independent. Barrett’s jurisprudence sometimes is to “benefit the team that appointed her,” Cooke said, “and sometimes it is not.”
What next?
The foreign aid ruling suggests there is a Supreme Court majority willing to “flex its muscle” when “procedure and the facts and everything are clearly going against the Trump administration,” Mark Joseph Stern said at Slate. Progressives should not see Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts — the other conservative who ruled against Trump — as “saviors, because they aren’t.” But the justices should be given credit for “drawing a line in the sand,” Stern added.
“MAGA world” is not interested in giving that credit, said NBC News. Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, called on Blackman to step down. Conservatives, he said, “feel like there was a bait and switch.”
