The Supreme Court justice is unpredictable to both liberals and conservatives.
Amy Coney Barrett can’t catch a break. After she issued the majority opinion in Trump v. CASA— limiting the power of district courts to issue nationwide injunctions — the left came down on her, hard. Progressive commentators decried her decision to curtail restrictions on executive orders, calling it “an existential threat to the rule of law itself.”
Throughout the winter and spring, on the other hand, Justice Barrett had instead faced significant backlash from the right for repeatedly siding with liberal justices against the administration. In January, she voted alongside Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the three Democratic-appointed justices to not delay President Donald Trump’s sentencing for his New York convictions before his inauguration. In March, she joined the same justices to reject the administration’s request to pause an order requiring it to pay $2 billion in foreign aid that the U.S. DOGE Service had tried to freeze. In April, she dissented alongside the liberals from a decision to stay judicial orders preventing the government from removing noncitizens who are designated as members of a Venezuelan gang.
So what’s going on here? Was she “showing signs of a leftward drift,” as so many Republican-appointed justices had before? Is she conservative, moderate or just unpredictable?
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Post
______________________
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images