The conservative legal movement is disappointed in Amy Coney Barrett. Last Tuesday, Barrett dissented along with the three liberal justices from the Court’s decision in San Francisco v. EPA, in which the other five conservatives voted to limit the EPA’s power to enforce the Clean Water Act. Then, when President Donald Trump delivered his joint address to Congress that evening, she didn’t smile enough from her seat in the audience.
“Look at how Justice Amy Coney Barrett looks at our duly elected President, the man who put her on the Supreme Court,“ one conservative influencer tweeted. “She looks very bitter. No wonder why she keeps ruling with the liberals against him.” Former White House Chief Strategist Steven Bannon didn’t detect enough deference, either. “That is not a look of admiration and what a great speech and what a magnificent president,” he said on his podcast.
This look from Amy Coney Barrett is NOT the look of…
“I got your back Sir”She is totally compromised. pic.twitter.com/cd96qhUfKU
— ZZZ (@AskMeLaterOn) March 5, 2025
Finally, on Wednesday, Barrett again broke ranks, this time joining Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberals to deny the Trump administration’s request to illegally withhold billions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development. After a federal district court ordered Trump to release funds to USAID that it owed for completed work, Trump asked the Supreme Court to vacate the order. The Court said no. And Republicans said enough is enough.
“With each passing day, Justice Barrett is demonstrating why she had no business being appointed to the Supreme Court,” said Josh Blackman, a perplexingly prominent conservative law professor. He cited Barrett’s votes in the EPA and USAID cases as proof that she can’t be trusted to make “important jurisprudential contributions,” meaning deliver conservative results, and pointed to her facial expression at Trump’s speech as evidence that she doesn’t like the president anyway. Blackman also wrote that Barrett had “leapfrogged” over other qualified candidates when Trump appointed her as an appeals court judge, and that she could be “the least qualified Supreme Court nominee in modern history.” He concluded that Barrett should resign, and suggested she and her family would be happier back home in Indiana.
Other pundits were even more blunt in their criticism. “She was picked because she’s a woman,” said Mike Davis, a conservative activist reportedly advising the Trump White House on judicial nominations. Davis also suggested that, although one could politely describe Barrett’s approach to the work as “incremental,” he preferred other language. “I would say that she’s weak and that she’s scared of her shadow,” Davis said. “I’ve also said that she’s a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.”
Much of the conservative backlash has linked Barrett’s purported failings to her identity. “As a female who leans right, I’m kind of sick,” said Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor who said Santa and Jesus are both white. “Get somebody with some rhetorical balls.” Other conservative media creeps latched on to the idea that Barrett’s appointment was the product of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—within the first Trump administration, apparently. “Amy Coney Barrett. DEI Judge,” one tweeted; “Amy Commie Barrett,” another replied.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Barrett is, of course, no leftist or anything resembling a leftist, and some establishment conservatives came to her defense. The National Review’s Charles Cooke characterized the criticisms as “nonsense,” and Zillow enthusiast Ed Whelan called Barrett “an outstanding justice.” Federalist Society Co-Chair Leonard Leo described Barrett to CNN as part of “the vanguard of conservative jurisprudence on abortion, racial preferences, the administrative state, religious freedom, Trump immunity, guns and the Second Amendment.” But apparently, that is not enough for her critics, who warned that conservatives would “keep getting burned” if the White House doesn’t “stop playing DEI games with judicial picks.”
Barrett’s fellow travelers on the right felt betrayed, and voiced that betrayal with the kind of vitriol they normally reserve for minorities and poor people. Often, when a marginalized person ventures outside of the box conservatives try to put them in, Republicans attack their credentials and character, painting them as undeserving and ungracious. Barrett, a lifelong conservative less than three years removed from casting the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, got to experience a version of that this week. Republicans have from time to time been disappointed in the Republican men on the Court too, of course, but they aren’t telling Roberts that he’s unqualified, that he has kids at home, or that he should go back to Indiana and smile on his way out. Barrett is a dutiful foot soldier of the patriarchy, but she’s still a woman.
Trump indicated over the weekend that he’s still happy with Barrett. “I think she’s a very good woman. She’s very smart,” he told reporters. But Davis says the administration is not looking for justices like her anymore, promising “more bold, more fearless, less DEI, and people who are going to be more of a sure bet.” The Court already has no room for women’s rights; the Court that conservatives want to build will have no room for the woman still actively helping Republicans take those rights away, either.
