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WASHINGTON – When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court five years ago, her supporters assumed and her critics feared she would be a reliable vote for President Donald Trump.
But in an interview with USA TODAY, Barrett declared: "I'm nobody's justice."
Indeed, she has been more independent than either faction thought at first, and is now seen as an occasional swing vote on a solidly conservative court.
That has surprised some analysts and outraged Trump's MAGA base. What would she do if Trump called her? "I might wonder if he had the wrong number,” Barrett said with a laugh.
In a wide-ranging, hour-long interview about her new book, "Listening to the Law," being published Sept. 9 by Sentinel, Barrett discussed how she views her role, how being a working mother helped her better understand some cases, and why she turned up the heat on one of her liberal colleagues.
Barrett says her job is to 'listen to the law'
One of the former Notre Dame Law School professor's main goals in writing her book was to persuade Americans that the justices don’t make their decisions based on personal preference or politics – partisan or otherwise.
That might be a tough sell.
In a 2024 USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll, many more people thought the court decided cases based on ideology, not the law. The public’s opinion of the court remains close to a three-decade low, according to a Pew Research Center survey released Sept. 3.
And sometimes that criticism is coming from within the court.
No rule that the Trump administration always wins
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of Barrett’s three liberal colleagues, recently wrote that the court seems to have a rule: “this Administration always wins.”
Barrett disagrees.
“I don’t think it’s true,” she said, adding the court doesn’t make decisions the way she might handle her children’s disputes – “OK, well, I’m going to try to even things out and you’ll win some and you’ll lose some.”
The numbers, however, might suggest Jackson has a point about Trump’s success. Among the two dozen emergency appeals the administration has made to the justices when lower courts blocked the president’s policies, nearly all have gone his way.
But Barrett said that while the focus is understandably on Trump because he’s the current president, the decisions she’s making are not about one man.
“It’s about the presidency,” she said. “And so the decisions that we make about executive power today are the same ones that will still be precedent three or four presidents from now.”
There’s a mismatch, she said, “between what the public expects and what the court’s doing because we’re looking at the long haul … but we all live in the current moment.”
First and only mother of school-age children on the court
At 53, Barrett is currently the youngest member of the court and could be there far into the future. She’s also the first and only mother of school-age children to serve on the Supreme Court.
“It doesn’t matter in terms of the law,” Barrett said about volunteering in her son’s special ed classroom or struggling with child care while making major decisions for the country, “because I think the law is law whether you’re a mother or not, or a man or a woman.”
Being the mother of seven was useful, however, when the court debated in January whether there were workable alternatives to age verification requirements for pornographic websites.
“Well, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Barrett said to the attorney representing the adult entertainment industry, who argued parents could easily block or filter content from websites that adults have a First Amendment right to access.
“Content filtering for all those devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with,” she told the lawyer.
Barrett on special needs parenting: 'it does something to your level of compassion, and just how you perceive people'
Barrett told USA TODAY she felt she knew what questions to ask in the same way that Justice Sonia Sotomayor might tap into her experience as a trial judge for certain cases.
When the court heard a dispute involving the specialized plans required by the nation's education law for children with disabilities, Barrett already knew what an IEP (individualized education program) is because her youngest child has Down syndrome.
"I do feel very grounded and connected to the lives of real people and the lives of people who have a wide range of experiences that are very different from the lawyers, for example, who practice before us. So I think that gives me perspective on people," she said. "I think most parents of children with special needs would tell you that it does something to your level of compassion and just how you perceive people."
Courts must 'stay in their lane'
The decisions Barrett has joined that have expanded presidential power – including a ruling that presidents have at least the presumption of immunity for their official acts – have been criticized for upsetting the balance of power the Constitution created across the three branches of government.
Barrett said the court can’t “make decisions in generalities like that,” standing back and asking how the checks and balances may have changed.
“The kind of overall patterns, or how any of us might feel about those abstract issues, aren’t the stuff of which judicial decisions are made,” she said.
Her argument that courts “have to stay in their lane” was also a point she recently made in response to Jackson’s disagreement with the court's landmark decision that limited the ability of judges to pause Trump’s policies.
In Jackson's dissent, she called the majority’s “legalese” a smokescreen obscuring a “basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?”
In Barrett's majority opinion, she wrote that Jackson’s “startling line of attack” is tethered neither to conventional legal terrain nor to “any doctrine whatsoever.”
A 'one jalapeño gal' who enjoys Tabasco once in a while
Their sharp exchange got a lot of attention in part because it was a departure from what Barrett once called her “one jalapeño” style of writing.
“I am typically a one jalapeño gal,” Barrett told USA TODAY. “But I am from Louisiana, and I enjoy Tabasco once in a while.”
Jackson “made her arguments forcefully," Barrett said, "and I thought they were important arguments that merited our response.”
Don't call her a 'swing vote'
Trump publicly thanked Barrett, saying she “wrote the opinion brilliantly.”
His praise came several months after some of the president's loudest supporters called Barrett squishy, a rattled law professor and a DEI hire for siding against the administration on one of the president’s many emergency appeals. Trump reportedly complained about her in private.
Conservative activist Amy Kremer posted on X, “As a woman, I’m ashamed I ever supported her.” She called Barrett "the biggest disappointment on the court.”
Ever since George Washington picked the first five members of the high court, all presidents have hoped their appointments would be “their” justices, Barrett said.
“And throughout history,” Barrett said, “presidents have been disappointed by what their justices with those appointments have done.”
But Barrett doesn’t think of herself as a “swing vote.”
“Swing, I think, implies indecisiveness. You just kind of blow back and forth,” she said. “And that’s not how I approach the law at all.”
No 'shrinking violet'
Asked what misconceptions people have formed about her since she joined the court, Barrett said some initially viewed her as a “shrinking violet, or not a confident person.”
“Hopefully, those have fallen by the wayside just in the way that I’ve conducted myself in the job,” she said.
People still, however, get wrong what they get wrong about all the justices, Barrett said – they think decisions are based on personal preference, not the law.
“I’ve disagreed with all of my colleagues at different times, but that’s because I’m not trying to march in lockstep with anyone – nor is anyone else. We’re just trying to get the law right,” she said. “I’m a lawyer.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Amy Coney Barrett says 'I'm nobody's justice.' That includes Trump.
Reporting by Maureen Groppe and Susan Page, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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