Outside the Beltway

Amy Comey Barrett Defying Expectation

She's making no one happy.

James Joyner · Monday, June 16, 2025 · 13 comments

NYT (“How Amy Coney Barrett Is Confounding the Right and the Left“):

As President Trump was leaning toward appointing Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court five years ago, some advisers shared doubts about whether she was conservative enough. But he waved them away, according to someone familiar with the discussions. He wanted a nominee religious conservatives would applaud, and with an election approaching, he was up against the clock.

Soon after Justice Barrett arrived at the court she began surprising her colleagues. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. assigned her to write a majority opinion — among her first — allowing the seizure of state property in a pipeline case, according to several people aware of the process. But she then changed her mind and took the opposite stance, a bold move that risked irritating the chief justice.

In another early case, as Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. tried to further his decades-long quest to expand the role of religion in public life, she preferred a more restrained route, setting off a clash in their approaches that continues. And in a key internal vote, she opposed even taking up the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to abortion, though she ultimately joined the ruling.

Anecdotal, yes? But the plural of anecdote is data, and it’s mounting.

She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome, according to a new analysis of her record prepared for The New York Times. Her influence — measured by how often she is on the winning side — is rising. Along with the chief justice, a frequent voting partner, Justice Barrett could be one of the few people in the country to check the actions of the president.

Now, of course, this could be misleading. Some cases are more impactful than others and the chart doesn’t break down her votes in a way to analyze that. Still, it’s interesting. And there’s this:

Overall, her assumption of the seat once held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has moved the court’s outcomes dramatically to the right and locked in conservative victories on gun rights, affirmative action and the power of federal agencies. But in Trump-related disputes, she is the member of the supermajority who has sided with him the least.

That position is making her the focus of animus, hope and debate.

In interviews, some liberals who considered the court lost when she was appointed have used phrases like, “It’s all on Amy.” When Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed on nonunanimous decisions this term, Justice Barrett joined them 82 percent of the time — up from 39 percent of the time in her first term.

Some of Mr. Trump’s allies have turned on her, accusing the justice of being a turncoat and calling her — a mother of seven, with two Black children adopted from Haiti — a “D.E.I. hire.” Her young son asked why she had a bulletproof vest, she said in a speech last year, and her extended family has been threatened, including with pizza deliveries that convey a warning: We know where you live.

We had too much hope for her,” Mike Davis, a right-wing legal activist with close ties to the Trump administration, said in a recent interview. “She doesn’t have enough courage.”

This spring, on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast, he tore into her in such crude terms, even mocking the size of her family, that Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, for whom Mr. Davis had once clerked, phoned him to express disapproval of his comments, according to people aware of the exchange. Mr. Trump has privately complained about her too, according to two people familiar with his thinking.

Certainly, in this environment, ruling in ways that displease the MAGA crowd comes with substantial risk. But, by all appearances, she’s ruling pretty much in the way we’d have expected someone of her background to rule in these cases.

But she rarely abandons the other Republican appointees in the most significant cases. “It’s a mistake by ignorant conservatives and wishful liberals to believe she’s moderating,” said Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who befriended her when they clerked at the court. Like others who know her, he said that both the right and the left had misread her. “She’s exactly the person I met 25 years ago: principled, absolutely conservative, not interested in shifting.”

Friends, former colleagues and people from the court describe the justice as more of a methodical problem solver than an architect with grand plans for the law. “A law professor to my bones,” she said in a 2022 talk, referring to her years teaching at Notre Dame Law School. When others tried to draft her for the bench, she was uncertain about becoming a judge, according to those who know her well. She still maintains a tucked-away office at Notre Dame.

Some on the right are turning her scholarly background against her, complaining that she is too fussy about the fine points of the law and sounding a rallying cry of “no more academics” for future appointments.

That she has deeply conservative views and rules accordingly should not be surprising. But much of what MAGA stands for is not conservative in any meaningful sense.

Her apartness shows in her votes and her signature move of joining only slices of her colleagues’ opinions. She agrees with most of the supermajority’s outcomes, but sometimes writes to say they took the wrong route to their conclusion. (One person from the court called her the Hermione Granger of the conservatives, telling the men they’re doing it wrong.) Or she joins the liberal justices but stipulates that she can’t fully buy in.

“She hasn’t found a team,” said Sarah Isgur, a legal podcast host, pointing to her habit of marking where she departs from conservative colleagues, and to a recent death penalty ruling in which she was sitting “in the middle of that decision.”

But the Trump administration’s conflict with the courts and pushing of constitutional boundaries may force her to take a more decisive stance. Of the three justices at the center of the court, where the most influence lies, she is the only one without a long trail of views on how much power a president should have — the issue at the heart of nearly all these cases.

“She doesn’t have 10 years to mellow into it,” Mr. Feldman said. “Now is the crisis.”

If her voting record exactly matched that of Ketanji Brown Jackson, that would still be only four votes. But I don’t judge Supreme Court justices on policy outcomes but rather on whether they’re intellectually consistent and independent. I disagree with the three Democratic appointees’ votes more than I agree; none of them strike me as hacks. I can’t say the same for a couple of the Republican appointees.

Another anecdote:

One morning in April, the justices formed a nine-person frieze of contrasts as they heard oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, over whether parents of public elementary school students are entitled to religious exemptions from lessons involving books about gay and transgender people. Justice Alito, quick to favor exemptions, clashed with Justice Sotomayor, who was skeptical. As she spoke, Justice Alito shut his eyes and leaned far back in his chair.

Justice Barrett composed herself into a portrait of someone in listening mode, eyes trained, chin resting on hands. She asked open-ended, just-trying-to-understand questions, then sharper ones, moving in on a factual hole in the school’s argument and politely forcing the lawyer to admit it. By the time the justices rose, American parents seemed likely to gain more control over the ideas their children encounter in public school.

Her queries made a similar impression when she arrived as a student at Notre Dame Law three decades ago: She was so incisive that several instructors said they were learning from her. She won a clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia but then chose the quiet work of a law professor.

Not the hotshot kind: “She wasn’t trying to break big new ground,” recalled Joseph P. Bauer, her civil procedure teacher and, later, fellow faculty member. “She is not going to present an argument that shifts the paradigm, or reconceives ways of looking at things, or makes big moves.”

The courses she taught were about the rules of the road — evidence, procedure, the fine-grained reading of laws. In her own scholarship, she delved into questions that even some academics considered too nerdy to answer. Mark McKenna, a former faculty member, said, “I remember people pushing her, Does anyone care about these things?”

Unfortunately, it seems that some on the Supreme Court do not, concerning themselves only with partisan and political outcomes. For the courts to have any legitimacy, the people have to believe that Justices are making a good-faith interpretation of the Constitution and statutes on which rulings are based. Process and procedure are everything.

There’s a whole lot more to the feature, which is worth a read.