When President Donald Trump appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 following the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, criticism of her came from both the left and the libertarian right. Liberals and progressives, along with some right-wing libertarians, saw Barrett — an admirer of the late Justice Antonin Scalia — as too socially conservative and were troubled by her involvement in the severe strict Christian group People of Praise. And in 2022, Barrett was among the five GOP-appointed justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling.

But in recent months, Barrett has been drawing her share of criticism from MAGA Republicans who believe that she isn't MAGA enough.

Far-right MAGA attorney and Trump ally Mike Davis attacked her as a "rattled law professor with her head up her a--." And MAGA conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called Barrett a "DEI appointee."

But Never Trump conservative and veteran Washington Post columnist George Will, in his September 26 column, argues that if Barrett's style of "originalism" is offending ideologues, that means she's doing her job well.

"Although Barrett is preternaturally nice," Will writes, "she irritates some people. The reason she does makes her an exemplary justice. It is her fastidious acknowledgment that certainty and precision are often elusive when construing, as an originalist, the Constitution's text — 'due' process, 'unreasonable' searches, 'cruel and unusual' punishments, etc. — in modern contexts. Awareness of uncertainties justifies judicious restraint: The duty to construe texts does not empower judges to try to discover — or guess — the purposes or intentions of those who wrote the words."

The conservative columnist and ex-Republican continues, "To put the point less gently than Barrett might: Some people with mind-closing jurisprudential orthodoxies are exasperated by the tentativeness inherent in originalism and textualism. Critics misperceive this as a lack of principled rigor. In judicial reasoning, however, the importance of living with the limited utility of principles is a principle."

Will stresses, however, that "Barrett's originalism is not so tightly tethered to the past that it cannot create rules implied by the Constitution's text, history and structure."

"Often, originalists resurface with differing conclusions," Will explains. "So, arguments continue. Get over it…. (President Abraham) Lincoln exemplified the painful patience sometimes demanded by what Barrett calls 'our constitutional culture.' Courts are secondary in maintaining this legacy of originalism. The public, inattentive and impatient, is primary."

George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance, who now works at the Brookings Institution, couldn't help but notice some comments made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett at an event on Thursday night.

The event was part of the 2026 Supreme Court Fellows Program, where the justices chat about their work and answer questions. Vance noted that these events rarely make news because they're not very interesting to those outside of the legal profession. But one comment Coney Barrett made piqued her interest.

“Freedom of speech and freedom of religion commit us to pluralism,” she said. “They commit us to tolerance. They commit us to having to respect and allow to be heard even those viewpoints that we might disagree with.”

Coney Barrett, a conservative appointee by President Donald Trump in his first term, is a devout Catholic.

"So, what does she make of a president who is not committed to freedom of speech or freedom of religion?" asked Vance. "Are we to draw the obvious conclusion? Or is she just speaking generically here?"

Coney Barrett discussed Article IV of the Constitution and how it was easier to amend the Constitution because the political climate was less polarized. The most recent amendment was about 30 years ago, with a small amendment regulating salary increases for federal officials and when they take effect.

Judge Robert Dow, who was leading the discussion, noted a documentary he watched about a case that delivered a message on the respect for the law. Coney Barrett wrote in her book that "respect for the law" isn't something that can be "legislated." It gave Coney Barrett an opportunity to throw a backhanded comment about Congress.

"You can't make people respect the law," she said. "And I think a lot in our society runs on norms. I mean, you can't catch everybody who speeds on the highway, just to, like, give an example. If everybody felt at liberty to drive 80, the police can't enforce all of that. I think a lot in our society when we think about constitutional provisions that are more important than speed limits like, you know, the freedom of religion, freedom of speech. All of those things are important, but look, the courts can't be the only guardians of those rights. A lot depends on elected officials who also take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and elected officials respond to what their constituents want. They respond to what the people want. And if people revere the Constitution and if people revere the law that lends itself, that fuels a culture in which law is respected."

Among the wars Trump began in his second term was one on the legal profession and judges themselves. Former staff recalled to reporters that, during his first term, he was frequently hamstrung by aides who told him something was illegal or would be struck down in court. He has now signed executive orders targeting specific lawyers and law firms, and uses his bully pulpit to target judges who rule against him. They are then faced with threats from Trump's supporters.

President Donald Trump may have attended Wednesday’s Supreme Court session in person to intimidate the judges, but if so his effort likely backfired, according to one expert.

“President Donald Trump bulldozed yet another longstanding norm of American government on Wednesday by becoming the first modern president to attend an oral argument of the Supreme Court,” CNN’s Aaron Blake wrote on Wednesday. Characterizing this as an effort to “browbeat” the judges, Blake elaborated that “Trump has made no secret that he wants these justices to feel the pressure. He savaged Kavanaugh in 2021 for occasionally ruling against him despite Trump having stood by his nominee during an arduous confirmation process in 2018. Trump has also frequently attacked Justice Amy Coney Barrett as she has emerged as a tough vote for him. And after the tariffs decision in February, Trump said both Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch were an ‘embarrassment to their families.’”

Yet Blake noted that despite Trump’s obvious desire to change the Supreme Court’s tune on cases pertaining to his administration, “he chose to do this at a particularly inauspicious time. Over the last few weeks, a series of rulings have gone against him on some high-profile issues” including those involving his efforts to kill the Voice of America, exclude mainstream media for Defense Department briefings and sanction Anthropic for not allowing the Pentagon to do whatever it wants with their technology.

“On Tuesday alone, judges both overturned Trump’s order ending NPR and PBS funding and halted Trump’s efforts to build a new ballroom on the White House grounds — which might be one of Trump’s most prized initiatives right now,” Blake added. “None of these cases are over. But they add to an increasingly ugly picture of how Trump’s policies have fared in court. (Because the courts take a while to act, that picture has come into focus slowly.)”

For these reasons, Blake anticipated Trump’s effort to strong arm the Supreme Court with his presence could backfire.

“It could make the justices — and other judges — feel more like they have to stand up for their branch of government, lest it look like Trump is controlling them to some extent,” Blake said.

Independent of Trump’s arrival, there are reasons to believe the Supreme Court will rule against Trump. He is challenging birthright citizenship, which was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution in 1868 and guarantees citizenship to every human being born in the United States. Because a constitutional amendment can only be changed by ratifying a new amendment, and not through executive orders as Trump has tried, the case against his effort seems cut-and-dried.

Per Supreme Court reporter Jimmy Hoover from Law.com, "After a friendly question from Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts right out of the gate expresses skepticism of the Trump administration's central argument: that children of undocumented immigrants are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States. He calls the [solicitor general’s] argument 'very quirky.'"

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett also seemed ready to reject Trump’s argument, and even Brett Kavanaugh pushed back several times. Because the three Democratic judges are also expected to vote against Trump, this means the president could lose by a margin as high as 6-3 or 7-2.

"It was clear over the past few hours that the justices, the majority of them, are deeply skeptical about his executive order limiting birthright citizenship,” CNN reporter Paula Reid said on Wednesday about the Supreme Court hearing. “Even the three conservative justices he appointed do not appear to be willing to side with his administration's interpretation of the 14th Amendment.”

Legal analyst Elliot Williams, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN that things could tilt against Trump in a way shocking even to contemporary observers.

"You could see an 8 to 1 decision here,” Williams said. “It's not out of the question. Certainly, there are five votes that were quite skeptical of the president and probably more. This was just not good."

Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, says New York Times legal columnist Jeffrey Toobin, one pattern has stood out in regard to the federal judges he nominates. During their confirmation hearings, when asked who won the 2020 presidential election, they consistently word their responses to leave the door open for election denial.

At each hearing, Senate Judiciary member Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) typically asks the same question: “Who won the popular vote in 2020?”

And every time, he receives some variation of the same response: “President Biden was certified and served four years as president.”

The key word there is “certified.” While it acknowledges that Biden was indeed named president, it doesn’t explicitly state that he outright “won” the election. This, says Toobin, is a blatant attempt to curry favor with Trump, who six years later still denies his loss on a regular basis.

Responses like this are common among Trump nominees to any government position, but according to Toobin, “There is a special peril when federal judges, who serve for life if confirmed, agree to demean themselves in this fashion.”

Blumenthal told Toobin that he always asks judicial nominees about the 2020 election as a “test of whether they are willing to stand up and be independent arbiters of fact, which they are required to be as district court judges, who often have to show some courage and backbone with cases with unpopular causes. The fact that they are so meek and easily cowed speaks volumes about their qualifications for the job.”

These days, such cowed behavior from nominees speaks to a new requirement for Trump approval: absolute loyalty. While during his first term he was content to select judges from a list provided by the conservative Federalist Society — judges who were more dedicated to conservative ideology than any one president — during his second term, he has made it clear that he expects personal loyalty above all else.

As an example for this, Toobin pointed to Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, two Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump who drew his ire after ruling against his tariffs. For Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, the decision was likely motivated by little more than their interpretation of the law. But for Trump, this was an act of betrayal. He didn’t merely express disapproval of their decision, but declared them “an embarrassment to their families.”

To Toobin, this kind of reaction portends that Trump will from now on select only judges he thinks are directly loyal to him above all else.

For his part, Senator Blumenthal says that with each nomination, he will continue to press the question of the 2020 election.

“I keep waiting for one or two of them to stand up and say, ‘I’m not going to say this nonsense. I’ve got plenty of other ways to make a living,’” he said. During one recent hearing, he was blunt with his words to a stonewalling nominee: “Don’t you feel kind of like monkeys or puppets here?”

President Donald Trump wants to ban mail-in balloting, and MS NOW analyst Jordan Rubin is concerned that the Supreme Court is prepared to help him do it, even if that means “injecting needless chaos” into American elections.

“The Supreme Court may be on the verge of injecting needless chaos and uncertainty into the midterm elections and beyond,” Rubin wrote for MS NOW. “That possibility was on display Monday, when the court heard a GOP-backed challenge to counting mail ballots that come in after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked by Election Day.”

Describing the efforts of Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to fight Trump’s mail-in ballots policy, Rubin wrote that some of the judges instead seem to “endorse” Trump’s position “to disqualify later-arriving ballots.”

“There’d be no reason for those parties to advance that position if they thought it would hurt Republicans’ electoral prospects,” Rubin wrote. “President Donald Trump has railed against mail ballots. He has also made unproven voter fraud claims a centerpiece of his elections stance. That dynamic was at play at Monday’s hearing, during which Stewart noted that the federal government has ‘sounded the antifraud theme’ but still could not show ‘a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.’”

Rubin noted that the more pro-Trump judges clamored for mail-in voting bans.

“Justice Samuel Alito, who sounded likely to side with the Republicans, seemed receptive to the ‘fraud’ narrative, as he cited arguments that ‘confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome’ of an election ‘is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash’ of ballots,” Rubin wrote. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked about fraud, too, wondering, ‘Is that a real concern? Is that something we should be thinking about? Confidence in the election process?’

Ultimately Rubin predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be the “pivotal votes in the relative center of the dispute.” Rubin’s nervous take was shared by Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern, who argued that there have been “some very disturbing questions from the Republican-appointed justices in today's Supreme Court arguments — definitely several votes to strike down laws in 30 states which count mail ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, as long as they're cast by Election Day. Not what I was hoping to hear."

He added, "Alito strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud. [Neil] Gorsuch and [Clarence] Thomas leaned in that direction as well. [Amy Coney] Barrett and [Chief Justice John] Roberts are harder to read.” By contrast, Politico’s Josh Gerstein predicted that the Supreme Court seems “likely to deliver a defeat to Trump and rule states can count ballots received after Election Day, with Roberts, Barrett and maybe Kavanaugh joining the liberals.”

Trump has a long history of refusing to accept defeat when he loses at something. He accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged when he was not recognized for his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” During the 2016 presidential election he falsely claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stole the Iowa caucuses from him, and then declared he would only accept the result of the general election if he won. Despite winning in the Electoral College, Trump received fewer popular votes than Clinton, and so falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots. He created a voter fraud commission to find evidence of tampering but never produced any proof.

During the 2020 election, Trump preemptively attacked mail-in voting, declared victory despite losing and inaccurately claimed votes were being "dumped" on him. Biden won that election in both the popular and electoral vote, and in response Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. Despite continuing to claim that the election was stolen, Republican columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post that Trump has had many days in court, and they all prove him to be stating untruths.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, 76, has given no public indication he plans to retire — but if he does, Senate Republicans stand ready to fast-track President Donald Trump’s nominee through committee and lock in a confirmation before the November midterm elections.

“Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that Republicans are ‘prepared’ for the possibility of a retirement as speculation swirls that Alito, a conservative vote on the Supreme Court, is weighing stepping down at the end of the current term, slated for the end of June or early July,” the Washington Examiner reports.

“That’s a contingency, I think, around here you always have to be prepared for,” Thune said. “And if that were to happen, yes, we would be prepared to confirm.”

Alito is thought to want to avoid a similar repeat of events when liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg eschewed requests from the left to retire during President Barack Obama’s term. Republican President Donald Trump was able to fill her seat upon her death with a conservative, changing the balance on the Court.

Justice Alito is not the court’s oldest justice — that distinction belongs to Justice Clarence Thomas, 77, who has given no public indication he plans to step down either.

“I hope they stay ’cause I think they’re fantastic, OK?” Trump told Politico in December 2025, referring to both Alito and Thomas. “Both of those men are fantastic.”

Should Alito or Thomas — or both — retire, Trump could secure a conservative majority, possibly for decades to come. Chief Justice John Roberts, also a conservative, is 71 and is not rumored to be seeking retirement.

The three remaining conservative justices Trump placed on the court during his first term. Amy Coney Barrett is 54, Brett Kavanaugh is 61, and Neil Gorsuch is 58.

The three liberal justices are Sonia Sotomayor, 71, Elena Kagan, 65, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, 55.