When Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, a lot of conservatives threw what amounted to a victory party. These days, some of those same people are sitting in the corner of the party muttering into their drinks.
The Justice’s recent rulings have left a chunk of the right wondering whether they got the Justice they were promised. Our reporter Alex Bruno spent a few days calling around conservative circles, and the word that kept coming up was “disappointed.” Not furious, mostly. Just let down, like someone ordered a steak and got a very nice salad.
“We were told she was a sure thing,” one longtime activist in Virginia said. “Now every big decision, I’m holding my breath.”
That’s a big shift from 2020, when Barrett was treated like a conservative superhero in a cardigan. The frustration isn’t coming from nowhere. On several closely watched cases, Barrett has gone her own way, sometimes siding with the Chief Justice in narrower opinions, sometimes writing separately to push back on her more conservative colleagues.
Legal scholars will tell you that’s just what an independent judge does. A lot of folks on talk radio don’t see it that way. One host in Texas called her “the most careful person ever to disappoint me,” which, honestly, is a pretty good line.
Online, it gets less polite. Some accounts have started calling her “Amy Coney Souter,” a reference to a past Republican appointee who drifted left. Barrett’s defenders find that comparison ridiculous. Her critics find it hilarious.
What’s interesting is where the complaints come from. It isn’t party leadership, which has mostly kept quiet. It’s the base, the folks who knocked doors and donated twenty bucks at a time because they believed the Court was finally going to change.
A Republican county chair in Ohio told Bruno, “I’m not saying she’s bad. I’m saying she makes me nervous. That’s not what I signed up for.”
Another, a retired attorney in Florida, was more measured. “She’s thoughtful. Maybe too thoughtful for the moment we’re in.” If any of this is getting to the Justice, she isn’t showing it. In her rare public remarks, Barrett has stuck to the same theme: judges aren’t politicians, and they shouldn’t rule based on who appointed them.
That’s exactly what her supporters love about her, and exactly what irritates some of the people who cheered loudest at her confirmation.
Barrett has become a favorite target of a certain kind of online conservative. Every big opinion day, the same accounts line up to grade her like a high school essay. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. “See me after class.”
Some of them keep literal spreadsheets of her votes, color coded. Bruno saw one. It looked like a Christmas tree that couldn’t make up its mind.
Liberals, for their part, aren’t exactly sending her flowers either. That’s the funny thing. She manages to disappoint both sides at once, which might be the clearest sign she’s doing the job her own way.
Probably for a while. The Court’s calendar is packed with cases that’ll test her again, and every opinion she writes will be read line by line by people hoping, or dreading, that she’ll go a certain way.
For now, Barrett remains on the bench doing her job the way she thinks it should be done. And a slice of the right keeps refreshing SCOTUSblog with one hand while clutching their pearls with the other. Some marriages are complicated. This one’s just getting started.