Amy Coney Barrett

Amy Coney Barrett is an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Donald Trump named her to the Court in September 2020 and the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed her 52-48 just as Americans were voting Trump out of office. The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo hand-picked Barrett and specifically lobbied Trump to select her for a seat on the Court. Trump said he wanted Barrett confirmed because he believed she would help his electoral chances as a ninth judge, “just in case [the 2020 election] would be more political than it should be.” Although the Court rejected Trump election challenge cases in 2020, Barrett and the far-right faction did rule in cases benefiting him in 2024 by making it harder for Black Americans to be represented, as with the case allowing racial gerrymandering in South Carolina. The 6-3 Republican appointed court of Federalist Society judges also gave Trump presidential immunity and could also take up future cases that determine the outcome of the 2024 election.

Barrett clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, a former Nixon administration official who helped launch the Federalist Society before becoming a federal judge who accepted dozens of luxury trips as a Supreme Court justice. Barrett also clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman, a former Nixon administration official who sought to punish students for protesting a Federalist Society event and who issued numerous controversial decisions often aligned with his right-wing friends on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Barrett also helped represent George W. Bush in his efforts to stop the recount of the ballots cast in Florida counties to determine whether Bush or Al Gore won the state’s popular vote. She acknowledged that “[o]ne significant case on which I provided research and briefing assistance was Bush v. Gore,” which included traveling down to Florida to aid the case. In December 2000, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court blocked the recount, effectively making Bush the winner, even though a subsequent counting of the ballots showed that Gore actually won Florida and thus should have been sworn in as president. During the hearing on her nomination, held just weeks before the 2020 election as Trump was challenging numerous election procedures, Barrett did not pledge to recuse herself from possible election cases that could reach the Supreme Court, despite the “potential bias” she may have, given her appointment by Trump on election eve.

[The tactics around Bush v. Gore in some ways also laid out a blueprint for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts. For example, the push to “replace the rule of law with mob rule” was exemplified by the so-called “Brooks Brothers’ riot” where well-dressed paid GOP operatives and Hill staffers rioted at a Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board’s recount of ballots and successfully intimidated the board, and leaving many votes uncounted. The 2021 insurrection in some ways drew from the Brooks Brothers’ riot on a larger and more violent scale in terms of trying to stop the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021. Similarly, both the Brooks Brothers’ riot and key elements of the January 6 events were seemingly coordinated in part by top GOP insiders.]

Before her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, Barrett spent years aiding a training program, called the “Blackstone Legal Fellowship,” funded by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)–which describes itself as promoting “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law” and which the Southern Poverty Law Center has categorized as a “hate group.” Barrett has not recused from cases litigated by ADF, including the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade’s federal constitutional protection for abortion. Also, she has refused to recuse from cases involving Shell, the company her father served for decades helping pave the way for expanded off-shore drilling that is fueling climate change.

Barrett, who is Catholic, has also been a member of the secretive charismatic splinter group called “People of Praise” (PoP), which “encourag[es] members to speak in tongues” and teaches women’s subservience to men: a handbook for the group “states that members are expected to be obedient to male authorities.” Notably, according to the Associated Press, “[f]ormer female members of the group [said] that wives were expected to obey their husband’s wishes in all matters, including providing sex on demand. One of the women also said she was forbidden from getting birth control because married women were supposed to bear as many babies as God would provide.” Barrett has described her marriage to Jesse Barrett, who is a partner at a law firm whose client list is not public, as a “partnership.” Barrett was listed as a “handmaid” in a PoP directory published in 2010, but key group documents were removed from the web after she was nominated for a federal judgeship.

During law school at Notre Dame, Barrett lived with one of the families leading the sect. PoP has “been criticized for endorsing discriminatory practices. Members who engage in gay sex are expelled, and private schools closely affiliated with the group – the Trinity Schools – have admission policies that in effect ban the children of gay parents from attending. Barrett has previously served on Trinity’s board of trustees.” PoP has also been the subject of “trauma and sexual abuse allegations” by some ex-members.

A recent investigation uncovered that Barrett has an additional tie to Leonard Leo’s court capture network via her colleagues at Notre Dame, where Barrett was a law professor for 15 years. Barrett’s close friend, former neighbor, and former Notre Dame law school and Supreme Court clerkship colleague is Nicole Stelle Garnett. Garnett, whose daughter is also Barrett’s goddaughter, sits on the board of Leo’s Federalist Society and on the advisory council of a Catholic University law school initiative that was funded by a $4.25 million gift directed by Leo. Garnett also works for the “Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative, a legal clinic created by the law school at the University of Notre Dame… Garnett has worked with St. Isidore from the start of its application process” to become the first Catholic school in the U.S. to be fully funded by taxpayers, an initiative launched in Oklahoma after recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions weakening the wall of separation between church and state. Garnett’s clinic was announced a few months before Barrett’s confirmation. She has refused to say whether she has discussed court cases with any U.S. Supreme Court justice, including Thomas, for whom she clerked, or with Barrett. Garnett and her husband, who also works for the Notre Dame clinic, recently filed a brief in a Supreme Court case in which Barrett and her others voted in their favor–supporting the use of taxpayer money for private religious schooling. Stephanie Barclay, a lawyer who spent years at Leo’s “Becket Fund for Religious Liberty,” is also part of the Leo-funded clinic at Notre Dame.

Leo also worked with Don McGahn to position her for her post, according to a book co-authored by Carrie Severino, a key Leo operative who runs the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) flush with Leo’s funding, all of which is from billionaire benefactors many of whom have had business before the court. (Severino is married to Roger Severino, a key author of Project 2025 and a former Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services who pushed a religious anti-abortion/anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.)

Additionally, during her career as a law professor, Barrett was a John M. Olin Fellow, funded by a foundation that sought to regress the law. She was also active in Leo’s Federalist Society, which announced her name being added to Trump’s shortlist of potential justices at a national Federalist Society event Barrett spoke at in 2017.

Notable Rulings:

Inventing Presidential Immunity from Criminal Prosecution; and Effectively Pardoning Trump

Barrett joined this 6-3 ruling that in effect granted Donald Trump immunity for any crimes he committed as President that could be construed as official acts of the executive of the United States. While this edict in theory allows Trump to be prosecuted for activities not cloaked as “official acts,” it bars the use of any evidence of his words or deeds related to official acts. It ignores U.S. precedent since our nation’s founding that no person is above the law, including the president. It also ignores the language of the Constitution, which grants no such immunity and specifies that any official can be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and the Constitution’s oath of office, which requires that a President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Prospectively, this ruling gives license to a future president to use his powers as chief executive and commander-in-chief, including the use of emergency declarations, to dramatically alter the law and the stabilizing norms central to American democracy, our economy, and our way of life (such as limits on the politicization of the Department of Justice and independent agencies, the deployment of immigration police to conduct round-ups, and the use of the military in the U.S.) without fear of criminal prosecution.

Related cases: Fischer v. United States (6-3 ruling limiting the use of obstruction charges against those involved in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection); Trump v. Anderson (5-4 edict restoring Trump to the Colorado ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists holding office.)

Overturning Judicial Deference to Agency Expertise; Limiting Statutes of Limitations

Barrett also joined a 6-3 ruling limiting the power of federal agencies and the experts and scientists within those agencies responsible for protecting consumers, workers, and even corporations, with regulations that keep products, food, our climate, medicines, and more safe and viable. In Relentless and Loper Bright, Barrett sided with litigation groups fueled with millions of dollars from Charles Koch’s fortune who sought to overturn the Chevron precedent. Although on the surface the case was about regulation of overfishing that threatens marine stocks, this ruling will allow special interests to challenge regulations promulgated to protect public health, our environment, and our bodily autonomy. Many such interests will likely use “judge-shopping” to find Trump appointees willing to substitute their views for the expertise of civil servants in federal agencies and issue orders suspending rules.

Related cases: Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (6-3 decision written by Barrett overturning the statute of limitations that provided that challenges to a federal regulation’s validity must be brought within six years of the rule’s issuance); SEC v. Jarkesy (6-3 ruling striking decades of practice allowing administrative law judges to assess violations of securities law and implicating other areas of the law).

Overturning Roe v. Wade; Eroding Church-State Separation; and Licensing Discrimination

Barrett’s confirmation played a key role in the Court overturning Roe v. Wade and federal constitutional protection for abortion in the 6-3 Dobbs ruling in 2022. The strident analysis in that opinion by Justice Samuel Alito calls into question the Court’s landmark rulings in Griswold v. Connecticut (protecting access to contraception) and in Obergefell v. Hodges (protecting marriage equality for LGBTQ+ Americans to marry the person they love). In 2024, she also joined two rulings that effectively postponed decisions to expand the Court’s anti-abortion agenda until after the 2024 election, by remanding cases challenging the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and challenging federal law requiring that pregnant Americans have access to emergency room treatment for abortions if their health is in danger, even if not dying.

She also joined the ruling eroding the separation of church and state by allowing public monies to be spent on private school religious indoctrination and allowing public school coaches to engage in inherently coercive prayer with players despite long-standing establishment rulings. She also joined in a 6-3 ruling in the 303 Creative case allowing a web designer to claim a religious exemption from anti-discrimination laws based on her opposition to same-sex marriage–even though no gay couple had asked her to create a website for them, an example of how the faction dominating the Court has ignored the Constitution’s case or controversy requirement.

Limiting the Voting Rights Act; Allowing Partisanship to Mask Racist Voting Map Drawing

Barrett also joined 6-3 rulings further limiting the power of the Voting Rights Act. In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the faction dominated the court overturned decades of precedent protecting against racial gerrymandering. The ruling allowed a voting map that had bleached more than 30,000 Black residents out of their traditional congressional district based on the claim by the Republican-dominated South Carolina legislature that even though the maps had a profoundly disparate impact on Black American voters that such maps could not be held unconstitutional or in violation of the Voting Rights Act so long as there were a partisan rationale for the map drawing. This ruling overturned the findings by the lower courts that the map was an illegal racial gerrymander, and it joins a series of rulings by the Roberts’ Court degrading the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.