WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump reveled in a major Supreme Court victory that curbed the ability of judges to block his policies nationwide, he had special praise for one of the justices: Amy Coney Barrett.
“I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly,” he said at a White House press conference soon after Friday’s ruling.
Barrett’s majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, which at least temporarily revived Trump’s plan to end automatic birthright citizenship, is a major boost to an administration that has been assailed by courts around the country for its broad and aggressive use of executive power.
It also marks an extraordinary turnaround for Barrett’s reputation among Trump’s most vocal supporters.
Just a few months ago, she faced vitriolic criticism from MAGA influencers and others as she sporadically voted against Trump, including a March decision in which she rejected a Trump administration attempt to avoid paying U.S. Agency for International Development contractors.
CNN also reported that Trump himself had privately complained about Barrett.
That is despite the fact that she is a Trump appointee with a long record of casting decisive votes in a host of key cases in which the court’s 6-3 conservative majority has imposed itself, most notably with the 2022 ruling that overturned the abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade.
One of those outspoken critics, Trump-allied lawyer Mike Davis, suggested that the pressure on Barrett had the desired effect.
“Sometimes feeling the heat helps people see the light,” he said in a text message.
Quickly U-turning, MAGA influencers on Friday praised Barrett and turned their anger on liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson instead.
They seized upon language in Barrett’s opinion in which she gave short shrift to Jackson’s dissenting opinion, in which the President Joe Biden appointee characterized the ruling as an “existential threat to the rule of law.”
Barrett responded by accusing Jackson of a “startling line of attack” that was based on arguments “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
Jack Posobiec, a conservative firebrand who a few months ago called Barrett a “DEI judge,” immediately used similar language against Jackson, who is the first Black woman to serve on the court.
In an appearance on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing streaming channel, he call Jackson an “autopen hire” in reference to the unsubstantiated allegation from conservatives that Biden’s staff was responsible for many of his decisions.
He then described Barrett as “one of the nicest people. She’s not some flame-throwing conservative up there.”
It is not just the birthright citizenship case in which the Trump administration has claimed victory at the Supreme Court in recent months.
The court, often with the three liberal justices in dissent, has also handed Trump multiple wins on emergency applications filed at the court, allowing various policies that were blocked by lower courts to go into effect.
In such cases, the court does not always list exactly how each justice voted, but Barrett did not publicly dissent, for example, when the court allowed Trump to quickly deport immigrants to countries they have no connection to or ended temporary legal protections for 500,000 immigrants from four countries.
Barrett defenders dismiss suggestions she would be influenced by negative comments from MAGA world, with Samuel Bray, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, saying her ruling that limited nationwide injunctions simply shows her independent qualities as a judge.
“It 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.
Barrett, via a Supreme Court spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment.
More broadly, legal experts said that in the Supreme Court term that just ended, Barrett showed that on many traditional conservative issues she is “solidly to the right,” Anthony Kreis, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.
There were fewer examples of her going her own way than in the previous term, when which she staked out her own path in some significant cases.
On Friday alone, she was part of a conservative 6-3 majority in three of the five rulings, including the birthright citizenship case. The others saw the court rule in favor of religious conservatives who objected to LGBTQ story books in elementary schools and uphold a Texas restriction on adult-content websites.
“I don’t think we can say she was ever drifting left, but she was occupying a center-right position on the court that occasionally made her a key swing vote,” he added. “This term’s docket at the end just wasn’t that.”
One notable wrinkle in the birthright citizenship case is that Barrett, as the most junior justice in the majority, would not have been expected to write it. Often, Chief Justice John Roberts, who gets to assign cases when he is in the majority, will write such rulings himself.
Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said the assignment suited Barrett, who is known for her expertise on legal procedure. But she also wondered if Roberts might have considered the impact of the complaints against Barrett and wanted to “give her a place to shine from the perspective of the right.”
Even if that were a consideration in Roberts’ thinking, Shapiro added, “I don’t see much evidence that she is doing things that she wouldn’t have done if not for the criticism she received.”
