Editors at National Review Online pan over-the-top criticism of one of the US Supreme Court’s best justices.
Criticism comes, rightly, with the territory of being a Supreme Court justice. Hysteria shouldn’t.
With the conclusion of the 2025–26 Supreme Court term and Donald Trump’s defeat on birthright citizenship, we have been treated to another round of abuse from right-leaning commentators directed toward Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The immediate trigger of their ire is Barrett’s joining the Trump v. Barbara majority (along with Chief Justice John Roberts and, on the outcome, Justice Brett Kavanaugh) striking down Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Barrett critics also cite her majority opinion in Watson v. Republican National Committee, which allowed states to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day for up to five days later, as well as her vote (along with Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch) to strike down Trump’s “emergency” global tariffs and her rulings against Trump in a few of last summer’s torrent of emergency decisions on deportations.
It’s the intemperate vitriol of these attacks, and their utter lack of perspective, that appalls us. Critics brand Barrett a traitor, a DEI hire, and a left-winger who has doomed the country. They complain that she makes poor decisions because she is a woman and a mother of adopted children from Haiti. Perhaps more ominously, there is much muttering that future Republicans should fill judicial vacancies with fewer people devoted to the law and more who will be mere party apparatchiks, voting in the results-oriented fashion we traditionally associate with the liberal justices.
The abuse of Barrett by the right mirrors the extent to which she has uniquely triggered the left over the years, from questions about her religion at her first judicial confirmation hearings to fresh charges that her recent votes in favor of Trump immigration policies are some sort of betrayal of her adopted children. As usual, anything done in imitation of the activist left is apt to be mixed with toxins.
