Amy Coney Barrett (Screenshot via CSPAN)
She’s awful.
There. I’m done.
Oh, I need more analysis? Okay, how about “She’s an insult to the memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
Still more? Fine. Amy Coney Barrett is rapidly moving up the list as a front runner to be Donald Trump’s choice to replace RBG. (Mercifully, whether Trump’s nominee will actually see a vote remains up in the air.) But that shouldn’t be a surprise; her name was bandied about for what became Brett Kavanaugh’s seat. And months ago, Trump said he was “saving [Coney Barrett] for Ginsburg.” So what do you need to know about her?
First, the basics. Coney Barrett is a law professor at Notre Dame and currently sits on the Seventh Circuit, though she’s relatively new to that job having been appointed by Trump in 2017. She got her BA from Rhodes College and JD from Notre Dame. She clerked for Antonin Scalia, and Judge Silberman of the DC Circuit before that. And key to the Republican mission to permanently remake the federal judiciary, she is only 48 years old, which could make her lifetime SCOTUS appointment very long indeed.
Coney Barrett has also, repeatedly, been described as a devout Catholic. Catholicism is is already far more represented on the Court than it is in the American population, but the overrepresentation of one religion (that I personally share) isn’t what’s sticking in the craw of liberals opposing a potential Justice Coney Barrett. It’s that her religion seems to play an outsized role in her judicial philosophy. She’s vehemently opposed to reproductive freedom, and during her circuit court confirmation hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein said of Coney Barrett’s opposition to the constitutional principles espoused in Roe v. Wade, “The dogma lives loudly in you.” And half the glee conservatives have in pushing Coney Barrett as the SCOTUS nominee is the prospect of a woman writing the decision gutting a woman’s right to choose in a wrong-minded and biologically deterministic belief that if a woman writes the decision it can’t be attacked as sexist.
Obviously the Right has attacked this concerns as religious discrimination, saying the criticism of Coney Barrett is because she is Catholic. This is horseshit. Never mind that the Democrat nominee for President is, himself, a Catholic; the trouble with Coney Barrett is the statements in contradiction to the established law on a woman’s reproductive freedom such as, “life begins at conception.”
In fact, Coney Barrett has been groomed to take on the religious cause to the judiciary since law school, as Politico writes:
[John]Garvey — who had served as assistant to Solicitor General Ted Olson in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department — arrived as a professor at Notre Dame the same year that Barrett matriculated as a student, and began steering the composition of the faculty into a more conservative, more traditionally Catholic direction.
“They were trying to create a certain phalanx of people mainly to overturn Roe, but also to prioritize religion,” the former member of the Notre Dame Law School faculty explained of Garvey and his allies.
An observant Catholic and a member of People of Praise — a small, devoutly spiritual Christian community known for fostering strong bonds among its members — Barrett espouses a conservative approach to interpreting the Constitution with a strong deference to religious values.
When someone tells you they want to rule as a theocrat, you should probably believe them.
She’s even written a law review article suggesting that Catholic judges recuse themselves in death penalty cases due to the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. Which, if taken to its logical conclusion would seem to actually increase the prevalence of the death penalty (if everyone who opposed it on moral grounds was ineligible to hear those cases, you’d be left with the judicial pool of only those who actively support the death penalty or is agnostic on the issue). And no, she does not have similar writings suggesting Catholic jurists recuse themselves in abortion cases despite the Catholic Church’s condemnation of that. So it’s a lot more about advancing the current Republican policy goals that any kind of moral consistency.
Indeed, in her time on the Seventh Circuit she’s voted repeatedly in favor of regulations restricting a woman’s right to choose, as per Reuters:
In 2018, Barrett was among the 7th Circuit judges who sought reconsideration of a decision that invalidated a Republican-backed Indiana law requiring that fetal remains be buried or cremated after an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2019 reinstated the law.
In 2019, Barrett also voted for rehearing of a three-judge panel’s ruling that upheld a challenge to another Republican-backed Indiana abortion law before it went into effect. The measure would require that parents be notified when a girl under 18 is seeking an abortion even in situations in which she has asked a court to provide consent instead of her parents, as was allowed under existing law. The Supreme Court in July tossed out the ruling and ordered the matter to be reconsidered.
As we can see, her time on the Seventh Circuit, though brief, hasn’t been without noteworthy decisions. As the Washington Post notes, she authored an influential opinion making it easier for college students accused of sexual assault to sue their schools:
Barrett led a three-woman panel of judges that said Purdue University may have discriminated against a male student accused of sexual assault when it suspended him for a year, a punishment that cost him his spot in the Navy ROTC program.
“It is plausible that [university officials] chose to believe Jane because she is a woman and to disbelieve John because he is a man,” Barrett wrote in the case, in which the accuser was identified as Jane Doe and the accused as John Doe.
And her dissents on the Seventh Circuit have shown an adherence to conservative principles:
In June, Barrett dissented when a three-judge panel ruled in favor of a challenge to Trump’s policy to deny legal permanent residency to certain immigrants deemed likely to require government assistance in the future. In January, the Supreme Court, powered by its conservative majority, allowed the policy to take effect.
Barrett indicated support for gun rights in a 2019 dissent when she objected to the court ruling that a nonviolent felon could be permanently prohibited from possessing a firearm.
“Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons,” Barrett wrote.
She also is the mother of seven kids, two of whom are adopted from Haiti, and apparently is considered a pretty good law professor. Not that ANY of that sentence should matter, as my colleague Joe Patrice said during the last Supreme Court vacancy:
These people love their kids, play nice with their neighbors, and provide fascinating dinner conversation. They may be entirely normal, even delightful folks personally. That doesn’t mean they haven’t dedicated their professional lives to inflicting harm on the most vulnerable in society.
It seems pretty clear exactly what kind of a Justice Coney Barrett would be.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
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