Justice Amy Coney Barrett authored the Trump administration’s biggest Supreme Court victory after months of facing fire from conservatives.
Speculation about Barrett’s leanings spread among conservatives online early in the term, with prominent accounts pronouncing her decisions “disappointing” and calling her a “DEI hire.” Now, criticism has been at least momentarily overshadowed by praise of her opinion in Trump v. CASA, which reined in district court judges’ use of nationwide injunctions.
Trump hailed the decision as a “monumental victory for the Constitution,” telling reporters he has “great respect” for Barrett.
“I just have great respect for her,” he said. “I always have. And her decision was brilliantly written today, from all accounts.”
Conservatives amplified criticism of Barrett this term after she sided with the liberal justices on the emergency docket in several cases, including joining the 5-4 majority that declined to block a lower court order forcing the Trump administration to pay out $2 billion in frozen United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funds in March.
“Barrett’s vote didn’t just defy Trump, who gave her the robe; it propped up a globalist system conservatives have long despised,” commentator Jack Posobiec wrote for Human Events. “That’s not a one-off—it’s a pattern.”
When Barrett declined to halt President Donald Trump’s sentencing in January, Article III Project President Mike Davis called her “a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” He acknowledged to Steve Bannon after the CASA ruling that he’s been “pretty rough on Justice Barrett,” but suggested “feeling the heat has helped her see the light.”
“I’ve always known that Justice Barrett was a constitutionalist,” Davis told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I never thought she was the next Sandra Day O’Connor. While Barrett got weak and wobbly at times as justices do, she delivered strong victories for the Constitution.”
Barrett was an essential vote in major victories for the conservative legal movement over the past few years, most importantly in reversing Roe v. Wade. She was also part of the majority that dealt a blow to the administrative state by reversing Chevron deference and ended affirmative action in college admissions.
“I think people cry wolf a lot of times,” JCN President Carrie Severino told the DCNF. “People see one or two cases and jump to conclusions. If we look at the full scope of her time on the court, she’s clearly been a very solid conservative.”
The Supreme Court’s public information office passed the DCNF’s request for comment to Barrett’s chambers, but the DCNF did not receive a response.
Leftward Drift?
This term wasn’t the first time conservatives’ excitement about her appointment has waned. Her opinion in Murthy v. Missouri during the 2023-2024 term, which found states and individual plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge Biden administration’s efforts to censor speech online, attracted similar disapproval.
“Even with ‘conservative’ judges like Amy Coney Barrett, we can’t expect any help from the Courts,” former Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz wrote on X.
An analysis released June 14 found she was “showing signs of a leftward drift.”
“ACB is aligning more frequently with liberal majorities and less with the other Republican appointees,” the analysis by Professors Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, and Michael J. Nelson found.
Barrett sided with the Biden administration 50% of the time in high profile cases, while the other five conservatives did just 33% of the time, according to the analysis.
In Trump-related litigation since her appointment in 2020, Barrett voted in his favor 59% of the time, the lowest percentage of the Republican-appointees. Justice Samuel Alito sided with Trump at the highest rate, at 94%.
President Trump: “I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly, as well as Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas. Great people.” pic.twitter.com/xT3a4VrTCX
— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) June 27, 2025
Notably, the analysis came out before the biggest decisions of the 2024-2025 term. Statistical analysis of judges’ actions should be taken with a “grain of salt,” Severino told the DCNF.
“If a judge is doing what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s not a matter of voting for or against a certain president,” Severino said. “If they’re applying originalism and textualism, it’s about what the law or the Constitution says.”
Barrett’s CASA opinion, along with delivering a victory for Trump, was also notable for the strong rebuke it handed to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote.
Barrett took the “gloves off” in her response to Jackson, legal commentator David Lat noted.
“Typically the justice employs rather restrained rhetoric, consistent with how she once described herself as a ‘one jalapeño gal’ — in contrast to the jurist for whom she once clerked, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a ‘five jalapeño’ kind of writer,” Lat wrote.
Professor Barrett
Some point to her background as a Notre Dame law professor as the key to understanding her approach.
“She’s a clear and consistent originalist,” Severino told the DCNF. “She’s very careful. You can see that she taught civil procedure because she cares a lot about the procedural issues.”
Barrett is “most comfortable when she is writing an opinion that is deferential to the government, and when she can rely on a solid academic theory,” South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman told the DCNF.
“I think that worked for her in CASA, as she found persuasive scholarship that universal injunctions are not proper,” Blackman said. “Likewise in Skrmetti, where the science is at best unsettled. But I think she is more skeptical when the government tries something new and the legal theory is not airtight.”
In United States v. Skrmetti, where Barrett was among the six justices who voted to uphold Tennessee’s ban on child sex changes, she penned a separate concurrence explaining why transgender status does not deserve greater protection as a “suspect class.”
“Beyond the treatment of gender dysphoria, transgender status implicates several other areas of legitimate regulatory policy—ranging from access to restrooms to eligibility for boys’ and girls’ sports teams,” she wrote. “If laws that classify based on transgender status necessarily trigger heightened scrutiny, then the courts will inevitably be in the business of ‘closely scrutiniz[ing] legislative choices’ in all these domains.”
Notre Dame Law School professor Samuel Bray told NBC News her ruling in CASA should “reinforce the sense that she’s her own justice and she’s committed to giving legal answers to legal questions.”
“We shouldn’t be looking for political answers to political questions,” he said.
Michael A. Fragoso, who was chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee during Barrett’s confirmation process in 2020, wrote in March that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knew Republicans could not have filled the seat without her.
“McConnell knew this, and for that reason insisted that she needed to be the nominee,” Fragoso said in a Public Discourse essay defending Barrertt. “Without Amy Coney Barrett, whoever Biden would have put in that seat would have made Ruth Bader Ginsburg look like Robert Bork.”
(Featured Image Media Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Paul Sableman)
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