For months, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has faced fierce criticism from conservatives over some of her decisions in cases involving President Donald Trump.
That even included Trump at times.
But after Friday’s blockbuster opinion in the birthright citizenship case, that blowback was suddenly a distant memory.
It was Barrett, who Trump nominated to the high court in September 2020, who delivered the president a clear and dramatic win, kneecapping the ability of lower court judges to block his agenda. Trump, who has privately complained about Barrett, was effusive in his praise.
“I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly, as well as Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas – great people,” Trump said during a celebratory news conference at the White House.
“I just have great respect for her. I always have,” Trump said. “And her decision was brilliantly written today — from all accounts.”
Given the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority – cemented when Barrett succeeded the late liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – the court’s liberal wing has always faced an uphill climb to wind up anywhere but in dissent. But at times, Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts have shown willingness to break from their more conservative colleagues.
Many conservatives were apoplectic in March when Barrett voted to reject Trump’s plan to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. The backlash over that decision from some close to Trump was swift, with one conservative legal commentator describing her on a podcast as a “rattled law professor with her head up her a**.” Others took to social media to describe her as a “DEI hire” and “evil.”
The anger directed at Barrett, a former appeals court judge and law professor, intensified when the Supreme Court divided 4-4 in a high-profile case questioning whether a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma should be entitled to taxpayer funding. Barrett recused herself from taking part in the case – she had multiple ties to the attorneys representing the school – and the even split left in place a ruling from Oklahoma’s top court that found the school unconstitutional.
In private, some of Trump’s allies had told him that Barrett is “weak” and that her rulings have not been in line with how she presented herself in an interview before Trump nominated her to the bench, sources told CNN.
“It’s not just one ruling. It’s been a few different events he’s complained about privately,” a senior administration official said earlier this month.
So it was notable that Barrett, the second-most junior member of the court, was assigned Friday’s major opinion. Because the senior-most justice on each side of a decision assigns the author of that decision, it means Roberts assigned the case to Barrett. Most court watchers assumed Roberts would write the opinion himself, or that it would be unsigned.
It was, by far, the highest-profile opinion Barrett has authored on the court.
And it was a major win for the president – the second time the Supreme Court has ended a term in as many years with a blockbuster ruling in his favor. Last year, the court ruled that Trump was entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution on federal election interference charges.
Barrett’s opinion doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump will be able to enforce the birthright citizenship order. Lower courts are likely to move swiftly to shut it down through other paths, such as through class-action lawsuits. But it will at least make it harder for groups challenging future Trump policies to get those measures paused on a temporary basis.
“As the number of universal injunctions has increased, so too has the importance of the issue,” Barrett wrote, without addressing the fact that some of that increase has been the result of a president who had admittedly sought to push the boundaries of the law in his favor.
“As with most questions of law, the policy pros and cons are beside the point,” Barrett wrote. “Under our well-established precedent, the equitable relief available in the federal courts is that ‘traditionally accorded by courts of equity’ at the time of our founding. Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding, or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter.”
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