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Decisions not made to suit Trump, Barrett says

In interview, she discusses how she views role on Supreme Court

By: Maureen Groppe
and Susan Page
USA Today

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.
..... Indeed, she has been more independent than either side through at first, and is now seen as an occasional swing vote on an admittedly 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 eh had the wrong number," Barrett said.
..... In a wide-ranging hour-long interview about her new book, "Listening to the Law," being published September 9 [2025] by Sentinel, Barrett discussed how she views her role, how being a working mother has helped her better understand some cases, and why she turned up the heat on one of her liberal colleagues.

'Listen to the law'

..... One of the former Notre Dame Law School professor's main goals i 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 decides cases on the basis of ideology, not the law. The public's approval of the court remains close to a three-decade low, according to a Pew Research Center survey released September 3. [2025
..... And sometimes criticism comes from within the court.
..... Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of Barrett's three liberal colleagues, reconnect wrote that the court seems to have a rule: "this Administration always wins."
..... Barrett disagreed.
..... "I don't think it's true," she said adding that the court doesn't make decisions the way she might handled her children's disputes: "OK, well, I'm going to try to even thins out, and you'll win some and you'll lose some."
..... The numbers, however, might suggest Jackson has a point about Trump's success. Of the two dozen emergency appeals the administration has made to the justices as lower courts have 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 all live i the current moment."

Mother of school-age children

..... At 53, Barrett is they 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 ever to serve on the Supreme Court.
..... "It doesn't matter in terns of the law," Barrett said about volunteering in her son's special ed classroom or struggling with child care while making major decisions of the country, "because I think the law is where 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 [2025] where there were workable alternatives to age verification requirements for phonographic websites.
..... "Well, whea, whoa, whoa," Barrett said to the attorney representing the adult entertainment industry who argued parents could easily block or filter content from websites ha 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 told USA Today she felt she know what questions to ask in the same way that Justice Sonia Sotomayor might tap her experience as a trial judge for certain cases.
..... When the court hear a dispute in evolving the individual education plans required by the nation's education law for children with disabilities, Barrett already knew what an IED is because her youngest child has Down syndrome.
..... "I do think it gives me a perspective on things," she said.

Courts must 'stay in their lane'

..... The decisions Barrett has joined that have expanded presidential power - including 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 among 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 agreement, 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 ability of judges to pause Trump's policies.
..... In her solo dissent, Jackson called the majority's "legaleses" 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 the majority opinion she wrote, Barrett responded that Jackson's "startling line of attack" is tethered neither to conventional legal terrain more to "any doctrine whatsoever.
..... Their sharp exchange got a lot of attention in part because it was a departure from what Barrett once called her "one jalapeno" style of writing.
..... "I am typically a one jalapeno gal," Barrett told USA Today. "But I an 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 praises came several months after some of the president's loudest supporters called Barrett squishy; a rattled law professor; and a diversity, equity and inclusion h9ir4e after she sided against the administration on one of the president's many emergency appeals. trump himself repeatedly complained about her in private.
..... Conservative activists 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 appointment would be "there" 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."
..... Asked what misconceptions people have formed about her since she's 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 thew say 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 - mor4r is anyone else. We're just trying to get the law right," she said. "I'm a lawyer."

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