Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected the idea of being a swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court during an appearance in Arkansas on Saturday, despite cases where she’s split from the court’s conservative majority.

Barrett, who President Donald Trump nominated to the court in 2020, spoke for an hour about her work during an event at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

Conservatives hold a 6-3 majority on the court, but Barrett has sided with the liberal justices on several key cases over the years. But Barrett said she doesn’t view herself as a swing vote.

“I don’t like that label because it makes me sound sort of flighty,” she said during the “Building Bridges” Q&A with Crystal Bridges Board Chair Olivia Walton. “You could say a lot of things. I don’t think I’m flighty. I think independent, or just following the law, would be the way to describe it.”

Barrett said that being a judge means that sometimes she’ll decide a case where she doesn’t like the results.

“I think that’s what it means to be faithful to the law and not try to align yourself with what people want you to do on the outside,” she said.

Barrett said that “spicy” dissents or sharp splits on the court aren’t an indication that justices don’t get along. When conferencing on cases, there aren’t loud arguments and justices do things to build collegiality, she said.

“I think when you only see someone as a package of ideas, especially if some of the ideas are ones you disagree with, it’s pretty hard like them, right?” she said. “But if you put the ideas aside and get to know someone as a person, then you can relate. Then you can put those things behind so the disagreements don’t dominate the relationship.”

When asked about artificial intelligence, Barrett told Walton the court doesn’t use it “because it would be insecure.”

“You can trust that our opinions are not AI-generated,” Barrett said, though she said her husband occasionally uses it for recipes.

Barrett, who has a daughter graduating from college and a son graduating from high school this year, said she would tell graduates to seek out people with whom they disagree.

“Make sure to give them grace and see people as humans,” she said.

Audio has emerged showing how police officials reacted to an alarming call about gunshot noises supposedly heard at the home of a prominent Supreme Court justice, which later ended up being revealed as an attempt at "swatting."

On Thursday, Andrew Leyden, a freelance photographer based in Washington D.C., revealed in a post to X that conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's home had been visited by local police after they received a call alleging that gunshots had been heard there. It was later determined that this was an attempt to get a SWAT or other emergency response team called to the home.

Leyden also shared an audio clip in which a police dispatcher and officer can be heard handling the call, redacted slightly to hide certain sensitive details.

"Police responded to a call for the sound of gunshots at the home of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett last night, but quickly realized it was a swatting call and cleared after meeting with her security detail," Leyden wrote in his post.

"Attention all units responding to the suspicious noise at [redacted]," the dispatcher can be heard saying. "There is an LOI [location of interest] for this address that has 24-hour security coverage for a high-priority resident of the county. Units responding to suspicious noise, be advised, we have not been able to get an answer on callback to the complainant's phone number. Unknown if it's going to be a swatting situation..."

Later, an officer responds after arriving at Barrett's home.

"Just made contact with security that's on scene," the officer said. "They should be outside in an Explorer. He said he hasn't heard anything. We're just going to meet up with him first, just to go over anything."

Barrett was appointed to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump in the waning days of his first term, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In the years since, she has generated controversy after taking part in numerous conservative majority opinions, including ones that ended Roe v. Wade abortion laws and another that struck down affirmative action. She has also, however, run afoul of Trump's staunch MAGA followers over a handful of instances where she broke with the rest of her conservative colleagues.

In March of 2025, reports emerged that Barrett's sister, Amanda Coney Williams, had received a bomb threat, claiming that an explosive device had been left in her mailbox. A bomb squad later determined that there was, in fact, no bomb.

When President Donald Trump appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, liberals and progressives attacked her as a hardcore social conservative ideologue who would move the Court far to the right. And Barrett, who considered the late Justice Antonin Scalia a major inspiration, was among the five GOP-appointed justices who, in 2022, voted to overturn Roe v. Wade after 49 years. Yet in 2026, Barrett often draws biting criticism from far-right MAGA Republicans — attacks that, according to The New Republic's Steve Kennedy, show how extreme the right-wing legal movement's standards now are.

"The conservative legal movement finally caught the car in Trump's first term and secured a supermajority of right-wing justices willing to impose their vision on the country," Kennedy explains. "But under Trump, the movement has so thoroughly radicalized itself that even solid conservatives like Justice Amy Coney Barrett supposedly can't be trusted. Conservatives' refrain, for decades, had been 'no more Souters,' referring to Justice David Souter, a George H.W. Bush appointee who drifted leftward after joining the court. Now, even though they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, gut the Voting Rights Act, kill the administrative state, and many more longtime conservative goals, the call has shifted to 'No more Souters. No more Robertses. No more Barretts.'"

According to Kennedy, the right-wing legal movement's purity tests are so severe in 2026 that "even some of Trump's most extreme" picks for the lower federal courts "are taking heat."

"Consider Fifth Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham," Kennedy observes. "Oldham is a Federalist Society favorite whom Trump nominated to the country's most MAGA-influenced appeals court during his first term, and as expected, the judge has turned out to be an aggressive culture warrior and Trump stalwart widely discussed as a potential future Supreme Court nominee. Oldham has built his reputation on extreme opinions attacking administrative agencies, voting protections, abortion rights, and immigrants, often in rhetoric designed more to provoke than persuade. Oldham pushes such far-right legal ideas that even the highly conservative Supreme Court regularly reverses his opinions as steps too far."

Kennedy continues, "Despite Oldham’s clear record supporting right-wing priorities, conservative commentators have called him a 'meh in robes' and said that his potential nomination doesn't even pass the 'laugh test'…. When even judges like Andrew Oldham are considered potential Souters, it is clear that there is no limiting principle."

The Federalist Society and conservative legal movement achieved their long-term goals during Trump's first term, securing a six-justice conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court.

This coalition has successfully overturned major precedents and rolled back decades of progressive jurisprudence. However, the movement's ideological standards have become so extreme that even its own appointees—justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and dismantle the Voting Rights Act—now face accusations of insufficient conservatism from hardline MAGA Republicans.

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).

Many U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the 2020s are coming down along strict partisan lines, with the six GOP-appointees justices on one side and the three Democratic appointees comprising the dissent. But in Pitchford v. Cain, a 5-4 ruling handed down on May 28, the majority united the three Democratic appointees (Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson) with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, while the conservative dissenters were Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas. And according to Reason's Damon Root, the decision showed a major disagreement between Donald Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

"On the surface, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh share much in common," Root explains in the libertarian-oriented Reason. "They are both judicial conservatives, both self-professed originalists, both former federal appellate court judges with respected records, and both were appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the same president. Yet there are certain legal issues that have brought out notable differences between them. The Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision in Pitchford v. Cain offers a fascinating case in point."

In Pitchford, the Roberts Court examined the precedent in 1986's Batson v. Kentucky, which said that prospective jurors cannot be excluded from juries solely on the basis of their race.

"In Pitchford, the Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether Terry Pitchford's rights were violated when a lower court decided that his defense lawyer had waived the right under Batson to challenge the prosecution's supposedly race-neutral rationales for peremptorily excluding four out of five prospective black jurors in the case," Root notes. "Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, held that Pitchford's constitutional rights had indeed been violated…. Writing in dissent, Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett, denied that any such injustice had occurred."

Root argues that Pitchford wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch disagreed on criminal justice matters.

"Normally, when it comes to matters of criminal justice, Gorsuch is the one with the reputation for being more sympathetic to criminal defendants," the libertarian journalist observes. "Kavanaugh, meanwhile, generally has a reputation for being the more reliable vote in favor of law enforcement. But this case flipped the script. Here, thanks to an opinion by Kavanaugh, written over Gorsuch's dissent, a Death Row inmate's conviction and death sentence were tossed out. This time around, it was Kavanaugh, not Gorsuch, who gave the civil liberties side the win."

Two Supreme Court justices stepped away from two cases on Monday, as Newsweek reported.

Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito decided to sit out federal appeals cases involving firearm convictions and pension payments, though it isn't entirely clear why.

The federal recusal statute (28 U.S. Code § 455) demands that federal judges and top justices must recuse themselves if their impartiality might reasonably be questioned or if their spouse has a financial or other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of a proceeding. Over the past several years, there have been several questions about cases the public and judicial critics believe justice should have recused themselves from.

Both appellate rulings were affirmed by the high court. It means the lower-court decisions were upheld in full.

The case that Barrett recused herself from came from the Seventh Circuit over an inmate named Eural Black. The case Alito recused himself from was a Fourth Circuit Court case about retirement benefits between employees and the companies DuPont and Corteva.

In Black's case, the lower court ruled that he was serving a longer sentence because of a "stacked" firearms conviction. Under the First Step Act his sentence should be reduced. "Black argued that the gap between his sentence and what he would receive today should qualify as an 'extraordinary and compelling' reason for early release," said Newsweek.

The lower court decided that its own precedent still barred "using those sentencing reforms as a basis for compassionate release, even after a new policy from the U.S. Sentencing Commission suggested otherwise."

In the case Alito recused himself from, the Fourth Circuit sided with corporations.

Plaintiff David Gasper sued, alleging that his monthly retirement benefits were reduced after his divorce. The corporation said that it spread the costs of survivor benefits across the total pension, which the court said was valid. The lower court also found that Gasper's claim for penalties "over delayed document disclosures," but there was no evidence of bad faith or harm.

There has been a “deterioration of morale” at the U.S. Supreme Court, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver told Bloomberg News, as he predicted “there will be major fireworks” by the time the high court’s term comes to a close around the end of June.

Other legal scholars share that concern.

“It appears from the outside that there has been an erosion of comity and trust,” William & Mary Law School constitutional and administrative law Professor Jonathan Adler told Bloomberg. “This raises the concern that it could affect how the court operates and inhibit deliberation.”

The court already appears to be operating at an unusual level of enmity.

“Tensions are starting to boil over,” Bloomberg reports. “Back-and-forth sniping between Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Samuel Alito Monday night marked the latest sign of strain at a court that has become a prominent symbol of the polarization besetting the country.”

During last week’s landmark ruling all but gutting what remains of the six-decade-old Voting Rights Act, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the court’s conservative majority of taking political sides. Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, called her claims “insulting” and “utterly irresponsible.”

More high-profile — and possibly highly-contested — decisions are to be handed down over the next eight weeks, and with them, more contentious opinions.

Justices are set to rule on President Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, they are to hand down opinions on transgender girls in women’s sports, and on Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

On Monday, as the court cleared the way for Louisiana to eliminate a majority-minority district, Justice Jackson “accused the court of betraying its principles, including its past pronouncements that judges shouldn’t change the voting rules on the eve of an election.”

“Just like that, those principles give way to power,” Jackson warned.

Jackson’s remarks “drew a fiery response” from Justice Alito, who said that her dissent “levels charges that cannot go unanswered.” Bloomberg reports that “Alito took particular umbrage at Jackson’s claim that the court was engaging in an unprincipled power play,” which he called “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.”

At the time, Justice Amy Coney Barrett in an appearance said that “collegiality is a decision you make,” as she shared that she and other justices spend time together at lunches and even dinners at each other’s homes.

“You have to make decisions to spend time with people, and particularly people with whom you might disagree, in order to forge those bonds,” Barrett said.

Pointing to what it calls the “Jackson Factor,” Bloomberg reports that Jackson, the nation’s newest justice, “has been at the center of much of the sparring,” and much of that seems to be with Justice Alito.

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."