Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett ripped into President Donald Trump’s solicitor general on Thursday for disrespecting one of the high court’s liberal justices.
Barrett, who was appointed by Trump in 2020 but has recently drawn the ire of MAGA, slammed Solicitor General Dean John Sauer for giving what she felt was an insufficient response to Justice Elena Kagan, an appointee of Barack Obama.
Barrett stepped in after Sauer’s answer and asked, “Sir, are you really going to answer Justice Kagan by saying there’s no way to do this expeditiously?”
She added, “You resisted Justice Kagan when she said, ‘Could the individual plaintiffs form a class…’ Were a class appropriate for class certification, you can see that it could resolve the question quickly?”
Sauer, who represented Trump in his federal obstruction case, responded: “Yes, absolutely it could do so. I mean, we obviously dispute that…”
The tense interaction occurred during oral arguments regarding the legality of nationwide injunctions by federal judges. The Supreme Court is weighing this issue because the Trump administration has contested that a district judge should not be able to single-handedly stop Trump from enacting an executive order that ends birthright citizenship in America.
Trump’s lawyers have argued that a judge should not wield more power than the president.
The high court has not been asked to weigh birthright citizenship’s constitutionality yet, but its decision on injunctions will determine whether Trump’s executive order will go into effect in the interim.
If the Trump administration gets nationwide injunctions overturned, it would mean that the parents of babies born without citizenship would each have to go to court individually to challenge the decision.
Despite Thursday’s arguments centering around injunctions, Trump’s executive order came up repeatedly.
“I got to tell you that does not fill me with great confidence,” Kagan told Sauer at one point, referring to the order. “How else are we going to get to the right result here, which is on my assumption that the EO is illegal?”
Sauer responded, “That would be a profoundly wrong result.”
The solicitor general, among other things, said that the Supreme Court needed to balance “the equitable factors as to the scope of remedial relief, not as to underlying merits.”
Kagan responded bluntly, “Yes, I mean, that’s a lot of words.” She then conceded that district judges occasionally abuse nationwide injunctions, but said that they should not be eliminated because of an “illegal” executive order by Trump.
Barrett, 53, has gotten under the skin of MAGA this year. Unlike the conservative stalwarts Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, she has sided with her liberal counterparts in some high-profile cases.
That included Barrett’s vote in March to uphold a lower court’s decision and reject the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. Her siding with the court’s liberal justices led some in Trumpland to refer to her as a “DEI pick,” adding that Trump should have picked someone further to the right after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.
“She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes,” wrote the MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich, who met with Trump in the Oval Office earlier this year, in a March post. “Another DEI hire. It always ends badly.”
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