MAGA world turns against Amy Coney Barrett

Post Reply New Topic

MAGA activists have turned against one of President Donald Trump's own appointees to the Supreme Court: Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Appointed by Trump in 2020, Barrett is a staunch conservative who has joined major rulings in which the court has moved U.S. law to the right, including on abortion and affirmative action.

But that's not enough for some of Trump's most aggressive supporters, who think the former Notre Dame Law School professor has been a disappointment. MAGA supporters see what some call an independent streak as a sign she isn't sufficiently aligned with or loyal to Trump.

"She is a rattled law professor with her head up her a--," said Mike Davis, who once clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Neil Gorsuch and described Barrett as "weak and timid."

arrett defenders have dismissed the attacks, scoffing at the idea that the justice’s conservatism is defined by how her decisions align with Trump and insisting Barrett won’t be affected by outside criticism. Barrett, reached via the Supreme Court, did not respond to a request for comment.

The anger from Davis and other right-wing personalities with large online followings stems mostly from a couple of recent high-profile, 5-4 decisions in which Barrett has been the deciding vote against Trump's side.

Swift and vicious reviews poured in from right-wing, Trump-allied figures this week when Barrett and other justices rejected a Trump administration attempt to avoid paying U.S. Agency for International Development contractors as ordered to by a federal judge.

"DEI judge," influencer Jack Posobiec posted on X, suggesting that Barrett was a "diversity, equity and inclusion" hire, presumably because she is a woman.

Trump at the time promised to pick a woman to replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"Amy Coney Barrett was a DEI appointee," another far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, wrote.

Her X post featured a photo of Barrett's family. Barrett and her husband have seven children, including two they adopted from Haiti, who are Black.

Even Barrett's brief interaction with Trump earlier this week, when he delivered an address to Congress, has been scrutinized by the online MAGA set.

"Look at how Justice Amy Coney Barrett looks at our duly elected President, the man who put her on the Supreme Court. She looks very bitter," Rogan O'Handley, an influential MAGA figure on X known by his handle DC_Draino, wrote in a post containing a video of the encounter.

One law professor, Josh Blackman at South Texas College of Law Houston, suggested that Barrett should step down from her lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court so that Trump can pick a replacement.

Barrett defenders have fought back, with Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor who studied under Barrett, saying in an interview he doubted she would be affected by the negative reactions.

The conservative National Review also weighed in, posting a column Thursday titled “In Defense of Justice Amy Coney Barrett,” deriding the criticism as “nonsense.”

Barrett's USAID vote followed a decision in January when the court, once again split 5-4, rejected Trump's request to block a sentencing hearing in his criminal hush money case in New York. The decision prompted angry reactions from pro-Trump voices including Davis.

In both cases, Barrett joined fellow conservative Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority, aligned with the three liberal justices.

Even before those cases, Barrett has increasingly shown a willingness to separate herself from the right flank of the court with a considered and cautious approach.

What the online critics fail to address is that Barrett has consistently cast key votes in favor of conservative causes, including when the court overturned abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action, expanded gun rights and undermined the power of federal agencies.

"It seems to me there is this impulse where personal loyalty to Donald Trump in an unquestioned way is seen as a requirement for a sitting justice on the Supreme Court. It doesn’t matter how conservative that person might be," said Anthony Kreis, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.

The harsh criticism of Barrett comes amid a stream of similar and sometimes more violent rhetoric aimed at judges who have stymied Trump's agenda.

Roberts recently warned that threats of violence and intimidation against judges have been increasing in recent years.

Barrett has spoken previously about how her appointment to the Supreme Court — and the security concerns that go with it — has affected her and her family.

Like all justices, she has protection not just at the court but also at her home in Virginia.

At a judicial conference last year, she recalled one of her sons asking her why she owned a bulletproof vest.

It doesn't matter what the MAGAs think of her, her confirmation killed Roe v. Wade.

First the MAGAs torpedoed Merrick Garland's chances of joining SCOTUS because they wanted to tarnish "the black guy's" (Obama) legacy. Then they decided to keep the seat vacant until "the next president". Then they kept going with the "e-mail scandal" to keep the whole female president thing from happening. Then they fast-tracked Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (the latter confirmed in an election year, the opposite of what they did in 2016).

And although she was ultimately confirmed, they accused Ketanji Jackson of supporting pedophiles (another right-wing obsession), to keep a black woman off the courts.

And now here we are.

Few modern Supreme Court ascensions have felt as baldly predetermined, even scripted, as Amy Coney Barrett’s.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still alive, and would be for two more years, when Donald Trump started telling people he was “saving” Barrett, then just confirmed to her first judgeship, for Ginsburg’s seat. He waited a whole week after Ginsburg’s death in September 2020 to push through Barrett’s nomination before the presidential election. At her confirmation hearing, there was little attempt to recast Barrett — who had a scant record as a judge but a plain history of ideological commitment — as a caller of balls and strikes. Instead, Republicans sold her to the public with an undisguised mash-up of conservative identity politics and quasi-feminist rhetoric. “All the young conservative women out there,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, then-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, at her nomination hearing, “this hearing, to me, is about a place for you.”

Barrett has, in large part, held up her end of the cynical deal. She provided the lone female vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and helped deliver conservative wins on guns and affirmative action. According to numbers crunched by Adam Feldman on Legalytics, since joining the Court, she’s voted with her fellow Trump appointees around 90 percent of the time. She’s hardly the second coming of, say, Justice John Paul Stevens, a Republican appointee who, by the time of his retirement in 2010, was considered a leader of the Court’s liberal wing.

Barrett has, however, recently shown that she is not a rubber stamp for Trumpism and will occasionally break from the party line if there’s a question of principle or procedural integrity. About a year into her tenure, Feldman wrote, and on a handful of occasions, Barrett did what some of her colleagues hardly ever do — vote with the Court’s center-liberal bloc: “Her willingness to prioritize fairness, clarity, and state autonomy over strict ideological loyalty has led to surprising alignments with the Court’s liberal wing in key cases.” Other court watchers have noticed the trend. “There are glimmers of real independence to her,” says NYU law professor Melissa Murray. Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck, who last summer wrote a New York Times op-ed calling Barrett “the most interesting justice” in part because of her willingness to break from the GOP pack, says what’s transpired since has only strengthened the case. Indeed, her incremental moves in the first few months of this year have already been enough to drive the MAGA right to hysterics.

In January, Barrett appeared to join Chief Justice John Roberts and the Democratic appointees in allowing Trump’s sentencing in his hush-money case to move forward, while the other Republican appointees would have granted Trump’s wish to block it. Then, in early March, Barrett wrote a partial dissent in a case involving the Clean Air Act that was joined by all three Democratic appointees. The next day, she and Roberts joined those same liberals to at least slow Trump’s decimation of foreign aid, leaving Samuel Alito to write a sputtering dissent. “Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” he wrote of the abruptly canceled USAID contracts. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”

So, apparently, was the right-wing commentariat. Mike Davis, a former Neil Gorsuch clerk and staffer on the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, told Steve Bannon that Barrett is “a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Much was made of a clip of Barrett seeming to grimace at Trump as he walked by her at the joint address to Congress that same week. “She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity-politics boxes,” raged Mike Cernovich. Laura Loomer called her a DEI hire. Allegations of “evil” aside, there was some technical truth to this; Graham’s chief counsel for nominations wrote that week that Barrett being a woman, being a conservative Catholic, and having a thin record were crucial to getting her through the Senate at a blisteringly quick pace, but he claimed that was “politics” and not DEI.

Though Roberts has previously enraged conservatives with his votes on cases involving the Affordable Care Act and immigration, and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have broken ranks, “Barrett’s the only one they call a DEI hire,” points out University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman. (Such dismissiveness is already assumed with the justices appointed by Democrats.) Barrett’s true crime, of course, is insufficient fealty to Trump. When law professor Josh Blackman called for her to resign, one of his stated reasons was that “I am fairly confident she does not like President Trump.” A few lone voices on the right, mainly lawyers whose allegiances encompass but aren’t limited to Trump, defended her, including one of the men credited with handpicking her, Leonard Leo — while hastening to add that he agreed with Alito on the USAID case.

It was one of a half-dozen cases in which the Supreme Court has been asked by Trump to intervene after lower-court judges uniformly blocked Trump’s rampage through the federal government. The emergency petitions range from challenges to the executive orders on birthright citizenship to the lawfulness of mass-firing federal employees to whether the administration can rely on the Alien Enemies Act to deny due process in deportations. Whether at least five of the conservative justices on the Court agree with their colleagues below or whether they change the rules for Trump will be the true test of the Court itself, and of how far Barrett is willing to diverge from the man who appointed her. For the die-hard Trump crowd, Barrett may pose a genuine threat, says Vladeck: “I think they’re correct to be worried if their only principle is winning.”

There’s more at stake for the Court here than just who wins or loses this round. The administration is betting that it can wield its power in unheard-of ways, even in apparent defiance of lower-court judges. That may be because it assumes five justices will scramble to back Trump’s agenda, but it’s also plausible it doesn’t care what any judges have to say about Trump’s lawlessness. It’s hard to know which scenario is more frightening.

In the meantime, the right might also not be doing itself any favors by antagonizing Barrett. “The ferocity with which the right has turned on her has to stick in her craw,” says Murray. “She was the darling of the right in 2020.” Trump himself arguably showed more political savvy than his flunkies when he told pool reporters, “She’s a very good woman. She’s very smart, and I don’t know about people attacking her, I really don’t know. I think she’s a very good woman.”

That’s the outside game. On the inside, it’s an open question as to how the interpersonal dynamics of the different ideological strands on the right and the center-left will play out. The two furthest-right members of the Court have staked their positions: “We’ve seen increasingly unrestrained rhetoric from Alito and Thomas,” says Vladeck. “We can’t know what that’s doing inside the building, but on paper it seems to be exacerbating the differences between them.”

Meanwhile, both Murray and Litman observed that some of the other justices on both sides of the aisle appear to be more solicitous of Barrett in oral argument. With the current composition of the Court, Barrett rarely has the opportunity to be a swing vote — Feldman identified a total number of six cases out of 30 so far in which she made the difference in the result — but, along with Roberts and occasionally Kavanaugh, can form a bloc of relative moderation. She’s only 53 and has plenty of time to make her mark.