'Fractured coalition': SCOTUS leak exposes rift between Amy Coney Barrett and other right-wing justices

16 June

Win McNamee/Pool via REUTERS

When liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020 and President Donald Trump succeeded in getting her replaced with Justice Amy Coney Barrett — a social conservative who considered the late Justice Antonin Scalia her judicial mentor — many liberals feared that Roe v. Wade was doomed. They were right: Barrett, in 2022, was among the justices who voted to overturn Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

But as conservative as Barrett is, she has turned out be more unpredictable than expected. Quite a few MAGA Republicans and Christian nationalists are claiming that she isn't far enough to the right, and reporting from the New York Times' Jodi Kantor reveals tensions between Barrett and other GOP appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Leaked documents, according to Kantor, show that Barrett, initially, didn't even want the High Court to hear the Dobbs case. But the other four justices pressed forward anyway, predicting that she would vote with them in overturning Roe — which she did.

"To many Americans," Kantor explains in an article published on June 15, "the conservative supermajority can look like a unified front reshaping the law through blunt force. Internally, the coalition is more fractured — six people debating how quickly to move, how far to go and whether public perception matters. Justice Barrett has favored a more deliberate approach than some of her colleagues."

The GOP-appointed justices Barrett has had the strongest disagreements with, according to Kantor, are Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

"As a junior justice," Kantor notes, "she is rarely assigned high-profile opinions. But she has defined herself through her concurrences, particularly ones that argue the other conservatives are going off track. Several times, she has told Justice Clarence Thomas that he leans too heavily on history in making decisions, including last year, when the Court rejected a lawyer’s attempt to trademark the phrase 'Trump Too Small.' Though Justice Barrett agreed with the outcome, she wrote that Justice Thomas' reasoning was faulty, in part because 'the historical record does not alone suffice' as a basis for the decision. She was drawing a line on how far originalism, the dominant method of interpretation on the legal right, could go."

Kantor continues, "The differences between Justices Barrett and Alito are deeper, say people who have worked with them, as well as outsiders who see them as foils in a debate over how to interpret and shape the law. Justice Alito, 75, is in a hurry to take advantage of the conservative dominance on the Court, barely disguising his annoyance at times when the other conservatives don't go along with him. Justice Barrett, who is likely to have a much longer future at the Court, measures every move."

Kantor discussed her reporting on Barrett during a Monday, June 15 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," describing her as the
"Republican appointee who has voted the most against President Trump."

Kantor told host Joe Scarborough, "She's kind of alone on the Supreme Court…. She really checked Justice Thomas in his views on originalism….. President Trump has complained about her in private."

In a June 16 post on X, formerly Twitter, Kantor highlighted some legal analysis of Barrett from Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, and Michael J. Nelson.

Kantor tweeted, "To everyone out there debating whether Justice Barrett is drifting left, please check out this analysis by Lee Epstein, @WashUChancellor and @mjnelson7 , which was vital to our reporting."

According to them, Barrett "is playing an increasingly central role on the Court" and "(mostly) isn’t Justice Scalia." And they noted that Barrett "is writing separately more often — especially in big cases."

Read Jodi Kantor's full New York Times article at this link (subscription required) and the Daily Beast's reporting here (subscription required).

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