Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett hit the road to promote her new book and hosts of MSNBC’s The Weekend are having an absolute field day with it.
“I think that Amy Coney Barrett’s little book tour has shown that she’s not ready for prime time at all,” network regular and Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern said Saturday. “She has had a number of flops that show she is not camera-ready. She’s really struggled to connect with the public, to translate legalese into anything that normal people can understand.”
Barrett, who was nominated by President Donald Trump to replace progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, sparked controversy even before assuming her post due to her “textualist” approach to the Constitution. She interpreted the document’s contents based on its original meaning at the time of writing rather than by virtue of some of the political, cultural and socioeconomic developments in the 230-odd years since.
As a devout Catholic and longstanding critic of Roe v. Wade, Barrett played an instrumental role in the conservative Supreme Court’s majority to overturn the landmark abortion ruling in 2022. More recently, she’s drawn fire for her authorship of the court’s opinion on birthright citizenship, which scaled back lower courts’ ability to challenge the second Trump administration’s policies across the board.
In her new memoir Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution—for which she was reportedly paid a $2 million advance, and on the tour for which she’s been targeted by hecklers—Barrett further defended her controversial approach to abortion rights.
“The evidence does not show that the American people have traditionally considered the right to obtain an abortion so fundamental to liberty that it ‘goes without saying’ in the Constitution,” she wrote in her book, per The Washington Post. “In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law—it has long been forbidden.”
But it was her comments on the Supreme Court’s so-called “shadow docket,” pertaining to the practice of issuing orders and summary decisions that effectively bypass the court’s normal case schedule, that Stern and the MSNBC hosts zeroed in on on Saturday.
Critics argue it’s chiefly through “shadow docket” processes that the Supreme Court has sought to back President Trump’s policies and the MAGA administration more broadly. Barrett has admitted use of these procedures sometimes comes at a cost, given it often leaves the court “in a position where we might be writing sooner than we want to be or with less information than we want to be.”
Stern, for one, was having none of it. “I think she’s really floundering out there, and this is one great example,” he said. “You know, Justice Barrett, if the Supreme Court doesn’t have enough facts to make a strong decision and doesn’t have a good enough grasp on the law to make a definitive ruling, maybe it shouldn’t be ruling at all.”
“That’s how the Supreme Court operated for the first 200-some odd years of its existence,” he added, in a pointed reference to Barrett’s “textualist” approach to the Constitution. “It was only in the last few years that the conservative justices decided that they would start leaping in at every moment to rule in favor of Republicans whenever they could.”
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