Amy Coney Barrett’s Week in Liberal Wonderland

Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett, once a Roe-killing conservative darling, recently triggered the Trump faithful by seeming to give a post-speech side-eye and ruling against the president who appointed her. On this episode, host and Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, alongside executive editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone, explores Barrett’s path to the high court, her judicial philosophy and faith, and the right’s reframing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor as a “DEI hire.”

Plus, legal affairs contributor Cristian Farias joins the show to break down how Donald Trump and Elon Musk are causing constitutional chaos—and what role Barrett, and her fellow justices, could play in reining them in. “I feel like we’re all living in a giant civics lesson right now,” says Jones. “I found myself actually looking at my son’s poster prop he has of the United States government and the three branches, and it just feels to me like we are discovering in real time how those checks and balances play out.”

Right from the jump, Barrett’s confirmation in 2020 was controversial. It directly contravened Mitch McConnell’s own demand that no justice be appointed to the Court during an election year. But Barrett, formerly a distinguished member of the Federalist Society, also raised concerns due to her staunchly conservative judicial bent, particularly when it came to abortion. Those concerns eventually proved more than warranted when, in 2022, the justice joined a conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson, obliterating the nearly 50-year precedent that protected the national right to an abortion. Still, Howorth notes, Barrett has “been a little bit more inscrutable in other places, and her voting record has also been on both sides of the aisle.”

In fact, we saw this just last week when Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts surprisingly joined the Court’s liberal justices in blocking Trump’s move to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. She also recently dissented against a conservative ruling on an EPA-related water pollution case, leading some in the MAGA base to believe she’s a “stealth liberal,” as Farias puts it. Farias, however, throws cold water on such a notion: “She’s a conservative through and through. The question is, how far is she willing to push that conservatism, especially…at a time when the president and the Congress are not respecting the clear boundaries that the Constitution sets between the executive, the legislative branch, and the courts?” Howorth, for her part, thinks that Barrett “may well have her own agenda.” But at the end of the day, “that doesn’t mean she’s not conservative. And to me this all sounds a lot like circa-2016 wishful thinking that Melania Trump was gonna suddenly be like, ‘Ah, I hate him. I’m out of here.’ And that just isn’t how it works.”

Elsewhere, Jones brings us to another Supreme Court case whose precedent could soon be on the chopping block: New York Times v. Sullivan, which raised the legal threshold for defamation suits by establishing a standard of “actual malice.” “Both Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have talked about revisiting Times v. Sullivan, which I think triggers alarms among journalists, and especially newsrooms around the country,” notes Calderone, who interviewed the Times’ David Enrich on the subject. VF also excerpted Enrich’s latest book, which covers the right’s legal efforts to overturn the 61-year-old precedent, an outcome that could be disastrous for media companies seeking to hold power to account.