Amy Vivian Coney Barrett

Amy Coney Barrett Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Incumbent
Assumed office	2020-10-27
Recommended by	Leonard Leo
Nominated by	Donald Trump
Preceded by	Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Judge of U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit
In office	2017-11-02 to 2020-10-26
Nominated by	Donald Trump
Preceded by	John Daniel Tinder
Succeeded by	Thomas Kirsch
Personal details
Name	Amy Vivian Coney Barrett
Born	1972-01-28
Parents	Linda Coney (née Vath)  |  Michael E. Coney
Birthplace	New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Nationality	American
Spouse	Jesse M. Barrett  (see also) (m. 1999)
Children	7
Education	Rhodes College, BA University of Notre Dame, JD
Religion	Practicing Catholic
Occupation	Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States
Affiliations	Member of: Federalist Society, 2005 to 2006 2014 to 2017 American Law Institute People of Praise
Associations	Past association with: Alliance Defending Freedom

Background

Amy Vivian Coney Barrett (born January 28, 1972) is an American jurist serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She is the fifth woman to serve on the court. She was nominated by President Donald Trump and has served since October 27, 2020. She was a United States circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2017 to 2020.

Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit, and the Senate confirmed her on October 31, 2017. Before and while serving on the federal bench, she has been a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School, where she has taught civil procedure, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation.

On September 26, 2020, Trump nominated Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court of the United States. Her nomination was controversial, due to Senate Republicans' previous refusal to hold hearings for Merrick Garland during an election year in 2016, claims that Republicans were rushing to fill the vacancy, and Ginsburg's own wish for her replacement not to be chosen "until a new president is installed." The next month, the United States Senate voted 52-48 to confirm her nomination, with Democrats unanimous in opposition.

Described as a protégée of Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked, Barrett supports an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

Early Life and Education

Amy Vivian Coney was born in 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Linda (née Vath) and Michael E. Coney. She is the eldest of seven children and has five sisters and a brother. Her father worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company, and her mother was a high school French teacher and homemaker. Barrett has Irish and French ancestry. Her great-great-great-grandparents on her mother's side were from Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, Ireland, while there is also Irish blood among her father's ancestors. Her great-great-grandparents emigrated from France to New Orleans. Her family is devoutly Catholic, and her father is an ordained deacon at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie, Louisiana, where she grew up.

Barrett attended St. Mary's Dominican High School, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school, from which she graduated in 1990. She was student body vice president of the high school. After high school, Barrett attended Rhodes College, where she majored in English literature and minored in French. She graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude and was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa. In her graduating class, she was named most outstanding English department graduate.

Barrett then attended the Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She was an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review, and graduated in 1997 ranked first in her class with a Juris Doctor summa cum laude.

Legal Career

Clerkships and Private Practice

Barrett spent two years as a judicial law clerk after law school, first for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1997 to 1998, and then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1998 to 1999.

From 1999 to 2002, Barrett practiced law at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, a boutique law firm for litigation in Washington, D.C., that merged with the Houston, Texas-based law firm Baker Botts in 2001. While at Baker Botts, she worked on Bush v. Gore, the lawsuit that grew out of the 2000 United States presidential election, providing research and briefing assistance for the firm's representation of George W. Bush (who was a former mail room employee at Baker Potts).

Teaching and Scholarship

Barrett served as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School for a year before returning to her alma mater, Notre Dame Law School, in 2002. At Notre Dame, she taught federal courts, evidence, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. In 2007, she was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Barrett was named a professor of law in 2010, and from 2014 to 2017 held the Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Chair of Law. Her scholarship focused on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis. Her academic work has been published in the Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame, and Texas law reviews.

At Notre Dame, Barrett received the "Distinguished Professor of the Year" award three times. From 2011 to 2016, she spoke on constitutional law at Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer program for law school students that the Alliance Defending Freedom established to inspire a "distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law." While serving on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett commuted between Chicago and South Bend, continuing to teach courses on statutory interpretation and constitutional theory.

In 2010, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Roberts appointed Barrett to serve on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.

Circuit Court of Appeals (2017-2020)

Nomination and confirmation

On May 8, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit after Judge John Daniel Tinder took senior status. A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination was held on September 6, 2017. During the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein questioned Barrett about a law review article Barrett co-wrote in 1998 with Professor John H. Garvey in which they argued that Catholic judges should in some cases recuse themselves from death penalty cases due to their moral objections to the death penalty. Asked to "elaborate on the statements and discuss how you view the issue of faith versus fulfilling the responsibility as a judge today," Barrett said that she had participated in many death-penalty appeals while serving as law clerk to Antonin Scalia, adding, "My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge" and "It is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law." Barrett emphasized that the article was written in her third year in law school and that she was "very much the junior partner in our collaboration." Worried that Barrett would not uphold Roe v. Wade given her Catholic beliefs, Feinstein followed Barrett's response by saying, "the dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern."

The hearing made Barrett popular with religious conservatives. Feinstein's and other senators' questioning was criticized by some Republicans and other observers, such as university presidents John I. Jenkins and Christopher Eisgruber, as an improper inquiry into a nominee's religious belief that employed an unconstitutional "religious test" for office; others, such as Nan Aron, defended Feinstein's line of questioning.

Lambda Legal, an LGBT civil rights organization, co-signed a letter with 26 other gay rights organizations opposing Barrett's nomination. The letter expressed doubts about her ability to separate faith from her rulings on LGBT matters. During her Senate hearing, Barrett was questioned about landmark LGBTQ legal precedents such as Obergefell v. Hodges (2015: legalized same-sex marriage), United States v. Windsor (2013, same-sex marriage), and Lawrence v. Texas (2003, sodomy). She said these cases are "binding precedents" that she intended to "faithfully follow if confirmed" to the appeals court, as required by law. The letter Lambda Legal co-signed read, "Simply repeating that she would be bound by Supreme Court precedent does not illuminate - indeed, it obfuscates - how Professor Barrett would interpret and apply precedent when faced with the sorts of dilemmas that, in her view, 'put Catholic judges in a bind.'"

Barrett's nomination was supported by every law clerk she had worked with and all of her 49 faculty colleagues at Notre Dame Law School. 450 former students signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting her nomination.

On October 5, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-9 on party lines to recommend Barrett and report her nomination to the full Senate. On October 30, the Senate invoked cloture by a vote of 54-42. It confirmed her by a vote of 55-43 on October 31, with three Democrats - Joe Donnelly,   Tim Kaine, and Joe Manchin - voting for her. She received her commission two days later. Barrett is the first and only woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit.

Selected Cases

On the Seventh Circuit, Barrett wrote 79 majority opinions (including two that were amended and one that was withdrawn on rehearing), four concurring opinions (one a per curiam opinion), and six dissenting opinions (six published and one in an unpublished order).

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972

In June 2019, the court, in a unanimous decision written by Barrett, reinstated a suit brought by a male Purdue University student (John Doe) who had been found guilty of sexual assault by Purdue University, which resulted in a one-year suspension, loss of his Navy ROTC scholarship, and expulsion from the ROTC affecting his ability to pursue his chosen career in the Navy. Doe alleged the school's Advisory Committee on Equity discriminated against him on the basis of his sex and violated his rights to due process by not interviewing the alleged victim, not allowing him to present evidence in his defense, including an erroneous statement that he confessed to some of the alleged assault, and appearing to believe the victim instead of the accused without hearing from either party or having even read the investigation report. The court found that Doe had adequately alleged that the university deprived him of his occupational liberty without due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and had violated his Title IX rights "by imposing a punishment infected by sex bias," and remanded to the District Court for further proceedings.

Employment Discrimination

In 2017, the Seventh Circuit rejected the federal government's appeal in a civil lawsuit against AutoZone; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission argued that AutoZone's assignment of employees to different stores based on race (e.g., "sending African American employees to stores in heavily African American neighborhoods") violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Following this, Barrett joined the court as it received a petition for rehearing en banc. Three judges - Chief Judge Diane Wood and judges Ilana Rovner and David Hamilton - voted to grant rehearing, and criticized the three-judge panel's opinion as upholding a "separate-but-equal arrangement." Barrett did not join the panel opinion, but voted with four judges to deny the petition to rehear the case. The petition was unsuccessful by a 5-3 decision.

In 2019, Barrett wrote the unanimous three-judge panel opinion affirming summary judgment in the case of Smith v. Illinois Department of Transportation. Smith was a Black employee who claimed racial discrimination upon his dismissal by the department and that he was called a "stupid-ass nigger" by a Black supervisor; the department claimed Smith failed work-level expectations during probationary periods. Barrett wrote that usage of the racial slur was egregious, but Smith's testimony showed no evidence that his subjective experience of the workplace changed because of the slur, nor did it change the department's fact that his discharge was related to "poor performance."

Immigration

In June 2020, Barrett wrote a 40-page dissent when the majority upheld a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration's controversial "public charge rule," which heightened the standard for obtaining a green card. In her dissent, she argued that any noncitizens who disenrolled from government benefits because of the rule did so due to confusion about the rule itself rather than from its application, writing that the vast majority of the people subject to the rule are not eligible for government benefits in the first place. On the merits, Barrett departed from her colleagues Wood and Rovner, who held that DHS' interpretation of that provision was unreasonable under Chevron Step Two [Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.]. Barrett would have held that the new rule fell within the broad scope of discretion granted to the Executive by Congress through the Immigration and Nationality Act. The public charge issue is the subject of a circuit split.

In May 2019, the court rejected a Yemeni citizen and her U.S. citizen husband's challenge to a consular officer's decision to twice deny her visa application under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The U.S. citizen argued that this had deprived him of a constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse. In a 2-1 majority opinion authored by Barrett, the court held that the plaintiff's claim was properly dismissed under the doctrine of consular nonreviewability. Barrett declined to address whether the husband had been denied a constitutional right (or whether the constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse existed at all) because the consular officer's decision to deny the visa application was facially legitimate and bona fide, and under Supreme Court precedent, in such a case courts will not "look behind the exercise of that discretion." The dispute concerned what it takes to satisfy this standard. A petition for rehearing en banc was denied, with Chief Judge Wood, joined by Rovner and Hamilton, dissenting. Barrett wrote a rare opinion concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc (joined by Judge Joel Flaum).

Abortion-related Cases

Barrett has never ruled directly on abortion, but she did vote to rehear a successful challenge to Indiana's parental notification law in 2019. In 2018, she voted against striking down another Indiana law requiring burial or cremation of fetal remains. In both cases, Barrett voted with the minority. The Supreme Court later reinstated the fetal remains law, and in July 2020 it ordered a rehearing in the parental notification case.

In February 2019, Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision upholding a Chicago "bubble ordinance" that prohibits approaching within a certain distance of an abortion clinic or its patrons without consent. Citing the Supreme Court's buffer zone decision in Hill v. Colorado, the court rejected the plaintiffs' challenge to the ordinance on First Amendment grounds.

Second Amendment

In March 2019, Barrett dissented when the court upheld the federal law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms. The majority rejected the as-applied challenge raised by plaintiff Rickey Kanter, who had been convicted of felony mail fraud, and upheld the felony dispossession statute as "substantially related to an important government interest in preventing gun violence." In her dissent, Barrett argued that while the government has a legitimate interest in denying gun possession to felons convicted of violent crimes, there is no evidence that denying guns to nonviolent felons promotes this interest, and that the law violates the Second Amendment. President Donald Trump pardoned Kanter in December 2020.

Criminal Procedure

In May 2018, Barrett dissented when the panel majority found that an accused murderer's right to counsel was violated when the state trial judge directly questioned the accused while forbidding his attorney from speaking. Following rehearing en banc, a majority of the circuit's judges agreed with her position.

In August 2018, Barrett wrote for a unanimous panel when it determined that the police had lacked probable cause to search a vehicle based solely upon an anonymous tip that people were "playing with guns," because no crime had been alleged. Barrett distinguished Navarette v. California and wrote, "the police were right to respond to the anonymous call by coming to the parking lot to determine what was happening. But determining what was happening and immediately seizing people upon arrival are two different things, and the latter was premature...Watson's case presents a close call. But this one falls on the wrong side of the Fourth Amendment."

In February 2019, Barrett wrote for a unanimous panel when it found that police officers had been unreasonable to assume "that a woman who answers the door in a bathrobe has authority to consent to a search of a male suspect's residence." Therefore, the district court should have granted the defendant's motion to suppress evidence found in the residence as the fruit of an unconstitutional search.

Qualified Immunity

In January 2019, Barrett wrote for a unanimous panel when it denied qualified immunity to a civil lawsuit sought by a defendant who as a homicide detective had knowingly provided false and misleading information in the probable cause affidavit that was used to obtain an arrest warrant for the plaintiff. (The charges were later dropped and the plaintiff was released.) The court found the defendant's lies and omissions violated "clearly established law" and the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment rights and thus the detective was not shielded by qualified immunity.

In Howard v. Koeller (7th Cir. 2018), in an unsigned order by a three-judge panel that included Barrett, the court found that qualified immunity did not protect a prison officer who had labeled a prisoner a "snitch" and thereby exposed him to risk from his fellow inmates.

Environment

In Orchard Hill Building Co. v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 893 F.3d 1017 (7th Cir. 2018), Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision, written by Judge Amy J. St. Eve, in a case brought by a property developer challenging the Army Corps of Engineers' determination that a wetland 11 mi (18 km) from the nearest navigable river was among the "waters of the United States." The court found that the Corps had not provided substantial evidence of a significant nexus to navigable‐in‐fact waters under Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurrence in the Supreme Court's decision in Rapanos v. United States. The case was remanded to the Corps to reconsider whether such a significant nexus exists between the wetlands in question and navigable waters for it to maintain jurisdiction over the land.

Consumer Protection

In June 2018, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it found that a plaintiff could not sue Teva Pharmaceuticals for alleged defects in her Intrauterine device due to the lack of supportive expert testimony, writing, "the issue of causation in her case is not obvious."

Coronavirus Measures

In early September 2020, Barrett joined Wood's opinion upholding the district court's denial of the Illinois Republican Party's request for a preliminary injunction to block Governor J.B. Pritzker's   COVID-19 orders.

Civil Procedure and Standing

In June 2019, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it found that the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act cannot create a cause of action for a debtor who received collection letters lacking notices required by the statute because she suffered no injury-in-fact to create constitutional standing to sue under Article III of the Constitution of the United States. Wood dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc. The issue created a circuit split.

In August 2020, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it held that a International Brotherhood of Teamsters local did not have standing to appeal an order in the Shakman case because it was not formally a party to the case. The union had not intervened in the action, but rather merely submitted a memorandum in the district court opposing a motion, which the Seventh Circuit determined was insufficient to give the union a right to appeal.

Nomination to the Supreme Court

Barrett was on Donald Trump's list of potential Supreme Court nominees since 2017, almost immediately after her court of appeals confirmation. In July 2018, after Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement announcement, she was reportedly one of three finalists Trump considered, along with Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Raymond Kethledge.

After Brett Kavanaugh's selection in 2018, Barrett was viewed as a possible nominee for a future U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. After the death of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18, 2020, Barrett was widely mentioned as the front-runner to succeed her. On September 26, 2020, Trump announced his intention to nominate Barrett to fill the vacancy created by Ginsburg's death.

Barrett's nomination was generally supported by Republicans, who sought to confirm her before the 2020 United States presidential election. She was a favorite among the Christian right and social conservatives. Democrats generally opposed the nomination, and were opposed to filling the court vacancy while election voting was already underway in many states. Democrats were angered by the move to fill the vacancy in a presidential election year only four months before the end of Trump's term, as the Senate Republican majority had refused to consider President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, more than ten months before the end of his presidency.

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• This subsection is excerpted from the Mitch McConnell entry.

... On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died. Shortly thereafter, McConnell issued a statement indicating that the U.S. Senate would not consider any Supreme Court nominee put forth by Obama. "The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president," McConnell said at the time. On March 16, 2016, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a Judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the Supreme Court. Under McConnell's direction, Senate Republicans refused to take any action on the Garland nomination. Garland's nomination expired on January 3, 2017, with the end of the 114th Congress.

In an August 2016 speech in Kentucky, McConnell made reference to the Garland nomination, saying that "one of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'" In April 2018, McConnell said the decision not to act upon the Garland nomination was "the most consequential decision I've made in my entire public career." McConnell's refusal to hold Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland during Obama's final year in office was described by political scientists and legal scholars as "unprecedented," a "culmination of his confrontational style," a "blatant abuse of constitutional norms," and a "classic example of constitutional hardball."

In October 2018 McConnell said if a Supreme Court vacancy were to occur during Trump's 2020 re-election year he would not follow his 2016 decision to let the winner of the upcoming presidential election nominate a justice. He noted that in 2016 the Senate was controlled by a party other than the president's - and argued that for that reason, the 2016 precedent was not applicable in 2020, when the presidency and Senate were both controlled by Republicans. In September 2020, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he announced the Senate would vote on Trump's nominated replacement. On October 23, 2020, McConnell set in place the Senate debate for the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ginsburg's seat. Barrett was confirmed on October 26, 2020. ...

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In October 2020, the American Bar Association rated Barrett "well qualified" for the Supreme Court opening, its highest rating. The ABA confines its evaluation to the qualities of "integrity, professional competence, and judicial temperament." Barrett's nomination came during a White House COVID-19 outbreak. On 2020-10-05, Senator Lindsey Graham formally scheduled the confirmation hearing, which began on 2020-10-12 as planned and lasted four days. On 2020-10-22, the Judiciary Committee reported her confirmation favorably by a 12-0 vote, with all 10 Democrats boycotting the committee meeting. On 2020-10-25, the Senate voted mostly along party lines to end debate on the confirmation. On 2020-10-26, the Senate confirmed Barrett to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52-48. Every Republican senator except Susan Collins voted to confirm her, whereas every member of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted in opposition. Barrett is the first justice since 1870 to be confirmed without a single vote from the Senate minority party.

The nature of her appointment was criticized by numerous Democratic Party politicians; Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called it "the most illegitimate process I have ever witnessed in the Senate." Republicans responded that they were merely exercising their constitutional rights, and that accusations of hypocrisy were nothing more than "an unwarranted tantrum from the left."

U.S. Supreme Court (2020-present)

Barrett became the 103rd associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on October 27, 2020. On the evening of the confirmation vote, Donald Trump hosted a swearing-in ceremony at the White House. As Barrett requested, Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath of office to her, the first of two necessary oaths. She took the judicial oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, the next day.

Upon joining the Court, Barrett became the only justice who did not receive her Juris Doctor from Harvard or Yale. She is also the first justice without an Ivy League degree since the 2010 retirement of John Paul Stevens (who graduated from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University School of Law) and the first to be appointed since Sandra Day O'Connor, who graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School. She is the first graduate of Notre Dame Law School and the first former member of the Notre Dame faculty to serve on the Supreme Court.

Barrett uses her maiden and married surnames in public. She has chosen to be called "Justice Barrett" in written orders and opinions of the court, as she did as a Seventh Circuit judge.

Circuit Assignment

In November 2020, Barrett was assigned to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ("Seventh Circuit"). This assignment's duties include responding to emergency applications to the Court that arise from the circuit's jurisdiction, either by herself or else by referring them to the full Court for review.

Early Oral Argument Participation

Having hired her allotted four law clerks, Barrett took part in her first oral argument on November 2, hearing the case U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club (involving whether the use of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request can be used to access documents from a U.S. agency that are protected under the deliberative process privilege exemption).

On November 4, the Court heard Fulton v. Philadelphia, in which the plaintiff, Catholic Social Services (CSS), sued the city of Philadelphia after being denied a new contract under the city's Fair Practices Ordinance, which bars discrimination in in public accommodations. The Archdiocese-affiliated CSS said that for religious reasons it cannot properly vet potential foster parents who are gay couples. CSS argued that under relevant precedent, the Court should find that CSS as a faith-based charity was unfairly singled out, given that the city allows race- and disability-based exceptions within foster-care placements. CSS further claimed the law is shown not to be neutral as required by the Court's 1990 decision Employment Division v. Smith, which allows the government to enforce neutral and generally applicable laws without having to make exceptions for individual religions, because the city labeled CSS' motives "discrimination that occurs under the guise of religious freedom." According to the New York Times, Barrett's questions during oral arguments were "evenhanded and did not reveal her position."

First Votes as a Justice

On November 26, 2020, Barrett joined the Supreme Court's majority in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 592 U. S. ____ (2020), in an unsigned 5-4 preliminary injunction in favor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Orthodox Jewish organization Agudath Israel of America, saying that certain COVID restrictions instituted by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had likely violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, in that they "single out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment." The Court said that the restrictions had likely impinged on the fundamental right of the free exercise of religion without their (in constitutional legal parlance) passing the legal test of "strict scrutiny." Cuomo's order was more restrictive than governmental orders involved in similar cases involving churches in California and Nevada that the Court had allowed to stand by a 5-4 vote. In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts saw no reason for the Court to intervene before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed the matter, inasmuch as New York State had already substituted revised rules "at least as favorable as the relief they currently seek." Ross Guberman, author of Point Taken: How to Write Like the World's Best Judges, told the Times he believed Barrett was the principal author of the Court's decision because of its measured tone and word choices, including its use of the word "show." In dissent, Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan, argued that, according to the Court's Employment Division v. Smith precedent, the case did not warrant application of "strict scrutiny." She wrote, "Justices of this court play a deadly game in second-guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily. [...] States may not discriminate against religious institutions, even when faced with a crisis as deadly as this one. But those principles are not at stake today."

Barrett delivered her first concurring opinion on February 5, 2021, in the case South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom.

Environmental Policy

Barrett authored her first majority opinion in United States Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club, which was decided on March 4, 2021. Traditionally the first opinion delivered by a new justice reflects the opinion of a unanimous court, but not always. While Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh wrote unanimous first opinions, Barrett, like her predecessor Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote an opinion for a divided court.

Although Barrett ruled against environmentalists in March, she voted against oil refineries in her first dissent, Hollyfrontier Cheyenne Refining v. Renewable Fuels Association.

LGBT Rights and Issues

In June 2021, Barrett joined a unanimous decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, ruling in favor of a Catholic social service agency that had been denied funding from the City of Philadelphia because it does not adopt to same-sex couples; the ruling also declined to overturn Employment Division v. Smith, "an important precedent limiting First Amendment protections for religious practices." In the same month, Barrett was among the six justices who rejected the appeal of a Washington State florist whom lower courts had ruled violated non-discrimination laws by refusing to sell floral arrangements to a same-sex couple based on her religious beliefs against same-sex marriage, leaving the lower court judgments in place.

Amy Coney Barrett: Potential Conflicts of Interest

BP p.l.c. v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore

BP p.l.c. v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore was a case in the United States Supreme Court dealing with matters of jurisdiction of various climate change lawsuits in the United States judicial system. The case was decided 2021-05-17, with the holding that the Fourth Circuit erred in holding that it lacked jurisdiction to consider all of the defendants' grounds for removal under §1447(d). ... In a 7-1 ruling (Sotomayor dissenting), the Supreme Court vacated the Fourth Circuit's decision, and remanded the case for further review.

... Justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in several of the oil companies, had recused himself from the case. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose father Michael E. Coney had worked for the Shell Oil Company, one of the defendants in Baltimore's case, was asked to recuse herself from the case by several amicus brief submitters, as she had previously recused herself from similar cases involving Shell during her tenure at the Seventh Circuit, but she did not do so for this case.

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• BP plc (official styling BP p.l.c., formerly The British Petroleum Company plc and BP Amoco plc) is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. It is one of the world's seven oil and gas "supermajors." It is a vertically integrated company operating in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, power generation, and trading. It also has renewable energy interests in biofuels, wind power, smart grid, and solar technology.

• [ClimateDocket.com, 2021-01-15] Will Amy Coney Barrett, Whose Father Was a Shell Attorney for Decades, Recuse from Climate Suit?

• [TrueNorthResearch.org, 2021-01-14] Justice Barrett's Ties to Shell and API Are Far Deeper Than Reported: Her Father Could Be Deposed in Climate Change Suits.

• ... Michael E. Coney worked for almost a decade at a law firm, Carver Darden, which represented Shell Offshore, Inc. as a client. Amy Coney Barrett also worked for oil and gas law firms in New Orleans during law school. ... In this timeframe [2000-2005], Amy Coney Barrett worked as an Associate with Miller Cassidy, which merged with Baker Botts, a Texas-based law firm that specialized in oil and gas law.

... It is regrettable that during the hearings on her nomination, then-Judge deployed a classic climate change denialist technique when she refused to acknowledge the scientific reality of human-caused climate change, and demurred that she is not a scientist. ...

• [theGuardian.com, 2020-10-24] Amy Coney Barrett faces recusal questions over links to Shell.  Barrett previously recused herself from cases because her father worked for Shell but has failed to commit to doing so in future.

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Judicial Philosophy, Academic Writings, Speeches, and Political Views

Many of Barrett's academic writings are about a professed imperative that jurists limit their work to determining the meanings of constitutional and statutory texts, reconciling these meanings with Supreme Court precedent, and using such precedent to mediate among various jurisprudential philosophies.

According to an analysis by University of Virginia law professors Joshua Fischman and Kevin Cope, Barrett was the rightmost Seventh Circuit judge, though not statistically distinguishable from six other Republican-appointed judges on the court. Compared to the other Seventh Circuit judges, she was more conservative on civil rights issues and less conservative on cases involving employment discrimination, labor and criminal defendants. According to a review by Reuters, Barrett's Seventh Circuit rulings showed that she mostly sided with police and prison guards when they were accused of excessive force. Due to the judicial doctrine of qualified immunity, police-officer defendants in many of these cases were shielded from civil liability because their actions were deemed not in violation of clearly established law. Jay Schweikert, who advocates for the Court's or Congress's elimination of qualified immunity, believes that her "decisions all look like reasonable applications of existing precedent." Legal commentator Jacob Sullum argues that while Barrett was on the U.S. appellate court she took "a constrained view of the doctrine's scope."

Textualism and Originalism

Barrett is considered a textualist, a proponent of the idea that statutes should be interpreted literally, without considering their legislative history or underlying purpose, and an originalist (of the original-public-meaning, rather than original-intent, variety), a proponent of the idea that the Constitution of the United States should be interpreted as perceived at the time of enactment. According to her, "Originalism is characterized by a commitment to two core principles. First, the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed at the time of its ratification. Second, the historical meaning of the text 'has legal significance and is authoritative in most circumstances.'" For the purpose of "describing the disagreement between originalists and nonoriginalists about the authoritativeness of the original public meaning," she refers to a section of a law review article by Keith E. Whittington, "Originalism: A Critical Introduction," that reads, "Critics of originalism have suggested a range of considerations that might trump original meaning if the two were to come into conflict. From this perspective, fidelity to original meaning is not the chief goal of constitutional theory. ... Confronted with suitably unpleasant results, the nonoriginalist might posit that the original meaning should be sacrificed. Alternatively, we might think that contemporary public opinion should trump original meaning. ...Underlying all these considerations is a view that courts are authorized to impose constitutional rules other than those adopted by the constitutional drafters. ... the originalist must insist that judges not close their eyes to the discoverable meaning of the Constitution and announce some other constitutional rule to supersede it. It is at that point that the originalist and the nonoriginalist must part ways."

Textualism, Barrett says, requires that judges construe statutory language consistent with its "ordinary meaning:" "The law is comprised of words - and textualists emphasize that words mean what they say, not what a judge thinks that they ought to say." According to Barrett, "Textualism stands in contrast to purposivism, a method of statutory interpretation that was dominant through much of the 20th century." If a court concludes that statutory language appears to be in tension with a statute's overarching goal, "purposivists argue that a judge should go with the goal rather than the text." For Barrett, textualism is not literalism, nor is it about rigid dictionary definitions. "It is about identifying the plain communicative content of the words."

Barrett clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and has spoken and written of her admiration of his adherence to the text of statutes and to originalism, writing: "His judicial philosophy is mine, too. A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they may hold." In one article she quoted Scalia on the importance of the original meaning of the Constitution: "The validity of government depends upon the consent of the governed ... so what the people agreed to when they adopted the Constitution ... is what ought to govern us." In a 2017 article in the law review Constitutional Commentary, reviewing a book by Randy E. Barnett, Barrett wrote: "The Constitution's original public meaning is important not because adhering to it limits judicial discretion, but because it is the law. ...The Constitution's meaning is fixed until lawfully changed; thus, the court must stick with the original public meaning of the text even if it rules out the preference of a current majority."

According to Barrett, textualists believe that when a court interprets the words of statutes, it should use the most natural meaning of those words to an ordinary skilled user of words at the time, even if the court believes that the legislature intended that the words be understood in a different sense. If the legislature wishes the words of a statute to carry a meaning different from how a non-legislator would understand them, it is free to define the terms in the statute. As Scalia put it, "All we can know is that [the legislature] voted for a text that they presumably thought would be read the same way any reasonable English speaker would read it." Scalia insisted that "it is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than by what the lawmaker promulgated."

Barrett has been critical of legal process theory, which gives a more expansive role to theory in shaping the interpretation of law than do textualism and originalism. She said that one example of the "process-based" approach can be found in King v. Burwell, in which the Supreme Court, for reasons related to the unorthodox legislative process that produced the Affordable Care Act, interpreted the phrase "Exchange established by the State" to mean "Exchange established by the State or the federal government."

Suspension of habeas corpus

In a journal article, "Suspension and Delegation," Barrett noted that constitutionally only Congress has the authority to decide the terms under which habeas corpus may be legitimately suspended. In all but one of the previous suspensions of habeas corpus, Barrett thought that Congress violated the Constitution "by enacting a suspension statute before an invasion or rebellion occurred - and in some instances, before one was even on the horizon." In an educational essay, she sided with the dissenters in Boumediene v. Bush after considering historical factors.

Precedent

At her 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett said she would follow Supreme Court precedent while on the appellate bench. In 2020, during her nomination acceptance speech at the White House Rose Garden, Barrett said, "Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold"; she also said judges "must apply the law as written." She explained her view of precedent in response to questions at the hearing.

In a 2013 article in Texas Law Review on the doctrine of stare decisis, Barrett listed seven cases that she believed should be considered "superprecedents" - cases the court would never consider overturning. They included Brown v. Board of Education (racial desegregation of public schools), and Mapp v. Ohio (prosecutorial exclusionary rule; incorporating the Fourth Amendment onto the states), but specifically excluded Roe v. Wade (1973; access to abortion). In explaining why it was excluded, Barrett referenced scholarship agreeing that in order to qualify as "superprecedent," a decision must have widespread support from not only jurists but politicians and the public at large to the extent of becoming immune to reversal or challenge (for example, the constitutionality of paper money). She argued that the people must trust a ruling's validity to such an extent that the matter has been taken "off of the court's agenda," with lower courts no longer taking challenges to them seriously. Barrett pointed to Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) as evidence that Roe v. Wade had not attained this status, and quoted Richard H. Fallon Jr.: "decision as fiercely and enduringly contested as Roe v. Wade has acquired no immunity from serious judicial reconsideration, even if arguments for overruling it ought not succeed."

Concerning the relationship of textualism to precedent, Barrett said, "It makes sense that one committed to a textualist theory would more often find precedent in conflict with her interpretation of the Constitution than would one who takes a more flexible, all-things-considered approach." She referenced a study by Michael Gerhardt which found that, as of 1994, no two justices in that century had called for overruling more precedents than justices Antonin Scalia and Hugo Black, both of whom were textualists, even though Black was a liberal and Scalia a conservative. Gerhardt also found that during the William Rehnquist court's last 11 years, the average number of times a justice called for the overruling of precedent was higher for textualist justices, with one per year coming from Ruth Bader Ginsburg (non-textualist) up to just over two per year from Thomas (textualist). Gerhardt wrote that not all the calls for overruling were related to textualism issues, and that one must be careful in the inferences one draws from the numbers, which "do not indicate either why or on what basis the justices urged overruling."

Affordable Care Act

In 2012, Barrett signed a letter criticizing the Obama administration's approach to providing employees of religious institutions with birth control coverage without having the religious institutions pay for it.

Barrett has been critical of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (2012), which upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's   individual mandate. She wrote in 2017: "Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power; had he treated the payment as the statute did - as a penalty - he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress's commerce power."

Abortion

Barrett opposes abortion. In 2006, she signed an advertisement placed by St. Joseph County Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, in a South Bend, Indiana newspaper. The ad read: "We, the following citizens of Michiana, oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death. Please continue to pray to end abortion." An unsigned, second page of the advertisement read, "It's time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children." In 2013, Barrett signed another ad against Roe v. Wade that appeared in Notre Dame's student newspaper and described the decision as having "killed 55 million unborn children." The same year, she spoke at two anti-abortion events at the university.

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• [Comment] With regard to Amy Coney Barrett's personal views on / against abortion, note her comments (above) on precedent; reiterated (excerpted) here.

... The principle by which judges are bound to precedents is known as stare decisis. Barrett listed seven cases that she believed should be considered "superprecedents" - cases the court would never consider overturning. They included Brown v. Board of Education (racial desegregation of public schools), and Mapp v. Ohio (prosecutorial exclusionary rule; incorporating the Fourth Amendment onto the states), but specifically excluded Roe v. Wade (1973; access to abortion). ...

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Affiliations

Barrett was a member of the Federalist Society from 2005 to 2006, and from 2014 to 2017. She is a member of the American Law Institute.

Associations

Association With Alliance Defending Freedom

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF, formerly Alliance Defense Fund) is an American conservative Christian nonprofit organization with the stated goal of advocating, training, and funding on the issues of "religious freedom, sanctity of life, and marriage and family." Because of its budget, caseload, and network of allied attorneys, ADF is seen as the most organized and influential Christian legal interest group in the country. ADF has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court and won all of them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the ADF as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The SPLC has also described the ADF as a "prominent Christian legal powerhouse," and criticized it for providing "advice to anti-gay bigots in Belize."

In the early 1990s, people from various denominations, primarily evangelical Christians, began to notice what they saw as progressive values supplanting traditional Judeo-Christian values in American society and threats to religious liberty. They viewed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as a major contributing factor to the erosion of values. In response ADF was incorporated in 1993 by Bill Bright (founder, Campus Crusade for Christ), Larry Burkett (founder, Crown Financial Ministries), James Dobson (founder, Focus on the Family), D. James Kennedy (founder, Coral Ridge Ministries), Marlin Maddoux (president, International Christian Media), and William Pew. ADF's first president was ADF co-founder Alan Sears, who also served as CEO and Chief Counsel. Sears was the staff executive director of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, popularly known as the Meese Commission.

Blackstone Legal Fellowship is a highly competitive, nine week intensive summer legal training program. Notable faculty have included U. S. Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett. It was founded in 2000 for the purpose of preparing Christian law students for professional legal careers. The first class comprised 24 interns. Since its inception Blackstone has trained more than 1,900 Christian law students. In an interview, ADF co-founder Alan Sears said in 2000 Blackstone was created in response to his observation, "There's got to be a better way for law students in America and for young lawyers than we currently have." The program is made up of interns, called Fellows, from a diverse selection of law schools as well as elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale. The program is named for Sir William Blackstone, the famed eighteenth century English legal scholar and jurist who wrote about the supremacy of God's law, which had a profound impact on the Founding Fathers of the United States.

In 2000 Alliance Defending Freedom founded the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, with 24 participants. The nine week intense summer internship program trains law students from a traditionalist perspective.

From 2011 to 2016, Barrett spoke on constitutional law at Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer program for law school students that the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) established to inspire a "distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law." In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the organization as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

In 2012, Alan Sears was asked about the major achievements of ADF. He said "among the things I am most thankful for are our Blackstone Legal Fellowship graduates."

In 2017 President Donald Trump's nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Amy Coney Barrett, was criticized by Senator Al Franken for teaching constitutional law at Blackstone Legal Fellowship. In her Senate committee hearing he referred to ADF as a "hate group." Barrett responded that the hate group label is "controversial." Barrett was confirmed to the court by a 55-43 vote in the Senate.

Personal Life

In 1999, Barrett married fellow Notre Dame Law School graduate Jesse M. Barrett  [local copy (html, captured 2020-10-13)], a partner at SouthBank Legal - LaDue Curran & Kuehn LLC, in South Bend, Indiana, and a law professor  [local copy (html, captured 2020-10-13)] at Notre Dame Law School. Previously, Jesse Barrett had worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana for 13 years. The couple lives in South Bend and has seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti, one in 2005 and one after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Their youngest biological child has Down syndrome.

Barrett is a practicing Catholic. Since birth, she has been a member of the Christian parachurch community   People of Praise, an ecumenical   covenant community founded in South Bend. Associated with the Catholic charismatic renewal movement but not formally affiliated with the Catholic Church, about 90% of its approximately 1,700 members are Catholic. In People of Praise, Barrett has served as a laypastoral women's leader known as a "handmaiden."

Immediately after Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court, the Christian parachurch community People of Praise began scrubbing photos and mentions of Barrett from their website.

Barrett has voted in both Republican and Democratic primaries. She tested positive for COVID-19 in mid-2020 and has since recovered.

Selected Publications

A partial list of Barrett's academic publications:

Additional Reading

Twitter.  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: "This, more and more, looks like it's not three schemes -- but it's one scheme. With the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges, & then showing up in court in these orchestrated amicus flotillas to tell the judges what to do."


[Source]

[2020-10-13] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse speaks during hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

Discusses:  Republican Party (GOP), Mitch McConnell,  dark money influencer-funded agendae (facilitated by Citizens United v. FEC) and attacks against:

• [start] the impartiality of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS);
• [~03:45] the GOP / dark money platform re: rescinding the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare")
• [~06:31] the GOP / dark money anti-abortion agenda (rescinding Roe v. Wade);
• [~08:00] the GOP / dark money anti-gay marriage agenda (rescinding Obergefell v. Hodges);
• [~08:30] "The Scheme:" how dark money funds and drives those agendae.
• [~21:00] "Who wins, when you allow unlimited dark money in politics? A very small group. The ones who have unlimited money to spend, and a motive to spend it in politics. They win; everyone else loses."

Senator Whitehouse: "What's behind us is now 80 cases, Mr. Chairman, 80 cases under Chief Justice Roberts [John Roberts] that have these characteristics. One, they were decided 5-4 by a bare majority. Two, the 5-4 majority was partisan in the sense that not one Democratic appointee joined the five. I refer to that group as the "Roberts five." It changes a little bit as with Justice Scalia [Antonin Scalia]'s death, for instance, but there's been a steady Roberts five that has delivered now 80 of these decisions.

In all these areas where it's about political power for big special interests and people who want to fund campaigns and people who want to get their way through politics without actually showing up, doing it behind DonorsTrust and other groups, doing it through these schemes, over and over and over again, you see the same thing -- 80 decisions, Judge Barrett, 80 decisions, and 80-0 sweep.

I don't think you've tried cases but some cases, the issue is bias and discrimination, and if you are making a bias case, as a trial lawyer -- Lindsey Graham is a hell of a good trial lawyer, if he wanted to make a bias case, Dick Durbin is a hell of a good trial lawyer -- if they wanted to show an 80-0 pattern, (A), that's admissible and, (B), I'd love to make that argument to the jury. I'd be really hard-pressed to be the lawyer saying, 'No, 80-0 is just a bunch of flukes, all 5-4, all partisan, all this way.' So something is not right around the court, and dark money has a lot to do with it. Special interests have a lot to do with it. Donors Trust and whoever is hiding behind Donors Trust has a lot to do with it."

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Here are the data shown in the preceding image.

Right-Wing Foundations Fund Anti-Consumer Protection Groups, 2014-present. Sixteen right-wing foundations gave nearly $69 million to groups urging the Supreme Court to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since 2014.
Source.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is an agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector. CFPB's jurisdiction includes banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mortgage-servicing operations, foreclosure relief services, debt collectors and other financial companies operating in the United States. The CFPB's creation was authorized by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whose passage in 2010 was a legislative response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the subsequent Great Recession. The CFPB's status as an independent agency has been subject to many challenges in court. In June 2020, the United States Supreme Court found the single-director structure removable only with-cause unconstitutional, but allowed the agency to remain in operation.
DonorsTrust	$23,460,705
Charles Koch Foundation	$12,986,462
Sarah Scaife Foundation	$7,550,000
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation	$5,579,500
Searle Freedom Trust	$4,550,000
Dunn Foundation  [DeSmogBlog profile]	$4,450,000
Donors Capital Fund	$2,522,680
John William Pope Foundation	$1,895,175
Bradley Impact Fund	$1,363,000
Mercer Family Foundation	$1,200,000
Adolph Coors Foundation	$1,155,000
F.M. Kirby Foundation	$672,500
Charles Koch Institute	$517,134
Ed Uihlein Family Foundation	$408,000
Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation	$395,000
William H. Donner Foundation	$167,000
TOTAL	$68,872,156

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse mentions the following dark money organizations and actors in his presentation.

• DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund

• The Bradley Foundation

• The Federalist Society

• Carrie Severino and the Judicial Crisis Network. The Judicial Crisis Network and the Federalist Society are in the same building, on the same hallway. Also mentions Leonard A. Leo.

• The Judicial Education Project [aligned with the Judicial Crisis Network -- aka The Concord Fund  |  aka Honest Elections Project [overlaps Judicial Crisis Network]  |  aka The 85 Fund [aka Judicial Education Project] -- an elaborate obfuscating shell game. Carrie Severino, who helped select Amy Coney Barrett as a SCOTUS nominee, also works for the Judicial Education Project.

• In 2018, DonorsTrust funded more than 99% of the Judicial Education Project, a legal alias for the "Honest Elections Project" and The 85 Fund."  [Source.]

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[2020-10-13] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse discusses the influence of dark money in the Supreme Court with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Following the 2nd day of hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Sen. Whitehouse discusses the impact of dark money on the judicial confirmation process.
[Source]

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• [JacobinMag.com, 2021-12-20] How Dark Money Bought Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court Seat.  In her confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett feigned ignorance of dark money groups. But she should be very familiar with such groups: new documents show that dark money bankrolled her Supreme Court nomination.

A conservative dark money group led by former president Donald Trump's judicial adviser Leonard Leo bankrolled Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court confirmation campaign with nearly $22 million in anonymous cash, while another nonprofit Leonard Leo helps steer saw a fundraising bonanza and showered cash on other organizations boosting Barrett, according to tax returns obtained by Jacobin Magazine.

The new tax returns shed light on how Amy Coney Barrett's successful, last-minute confirmation campaign was aided by a flood of dark money. They also reveal the rapid growth of Leonard Leo's already highly successful dark money network and its tentacles in the broader conservative movement.

Corporate interests with access to nearly unlimited money have a huge stake in tilting the court to the right: in recent years, the Supreme Court has played a pivotal role not only in swaying social policy, but also in shifting economic policy and corporate regulations. In Amy Coney Barrett's first year, she has already sided with corporate interests on a landmark climate case involving an oil giant that employed her father for decades, and she refused to recuse herself in a donor transparency case involving a foundation tied to a dark money group that backed her confirmation.

[ ... snip ... ]

• [Truthout.org, 2021-09-13] Barrett Says Supreme Court Isn't Full of "Partisan Hacks" as It Guts "Roe".

In a Sunday speech at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, named for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), only weeks after conservatives gutted abortion rights in Texas, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett decried the view that the highest court in the land is politicized.

"My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks," Barrett said, per the Louisville Courier Journal, at a celebration of the McConnell Center's 30th anniversary. "The media, along with hot takes on Twitter, report the results and decisions.... That makes the decision seem results-oriented. It leaves the reader to judge whether the court was right or wrong, based on whether she liked the results of the decision."

When asked about the "shadow docket," under which the Supreme Court has issued decisions under a relative veil of secrecy, and the abortion decision that political experts say could be a harbinger of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Barrett said it would be "inappropriate" to comment on the Supreme Court's decision regarding the Texas law, as other similar cases may soon be coming before the court.

Early this month, the Supreme Court refused to block a Texas law that effectively overturns Roe v. Wade in the state and has had a chilling effect on virtually all abortions in the state. The decision, handed down by conservative justices in the court, was widely panned as dangerous and cruel.

[ ... snip ... ]

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• [MotherJones.com, 2021-09-13] Amy Coney Barrett and Mitch McConnell Want You to Believe the Unbelievable.  The Supreme Court justice - and the man responsible for pushing through her hyper-political nomination - insist the high court isn't political.

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• [JacobinMag.com, 2021-09-14] The Supreme Court Justices Really Are "A Bunch of Partisan Hacks".  Amy Coney Barrett says Supreme Court justices must be "hyper vigilant" about their biases - less than four months after Barrett decided to participate in a major climate case against Shell Oil, the fossil fuel giant that employed her father [Michael E. Coney] for nearly three decades.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, and the Supreme Court is a dispassionate nonpartisan branch of government free of bias - this is the Orwellian fable that Justice Amy Coney Barrett is now asking Americans to believe.

And Barrett is asking us to believe it not merely after the court's wildly partisan ruling on abortion rights, but also just months after she promoted climate denialism to a national audience, and refused to recuse herself as she helped secure a legal victory for the fossil fuel giant that employed her father [Michael E. Coney] for decades.

This is a tale not just of cartoonish hypocrisy but also of deception - a frantic attempt to try to prevent more of the country from realizing the court is a corporate star chamber that has become one of the most powerful partisan weapons in American politics.

First, the blatant hypocrisy: In an event that seems torn out of the pages of the Onion, Barrett this weekend appeared with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), at an event to celebrate a University of Louisville facility he named after himself. After being introduced by the most partisan Senate leader in American history, Barrett declared that the Supreme Court - which now includes three people who worked directly on the Republican campaign to pilfer the 2000 United States presidential election - "is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks."

If that wasn't absurd enough, Amy Coney Barrett then declared that judges must be "hyper vigilant to make sure they're not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too."

That demand for ethical vigilance came less than four months after Amy Coney Barrett discarded her own past recusal list and opted to participate in the adjudication of a major climate case against Shell Oil - the fossil fuel giant that employed her father for nearly three decades. Barrett declined to recuse herself even though an amicus brief was filed in the case by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group that her father helped steer - and even though one prominent supporter of the case said her father could be subpoenaed for a deposition because of his "direct knowledge of and operational involvement in how Shell managed climate threats."

But no recusal came - and with Barrett's help, the Supreme Court sided with Shell and other fossil fuel giants, delivering a big procedural win for the oil and gas industry.

Barrett's participation in that case followed her Senate confirmation hearing, in which she refused to acknowledge the undisputed science of climate change (and in which flaccid Democrats decided not to bother to push her on recusal). She cast her position as an attempt to avoid being opinionated about the matter, but of course refusing to stipulate basic scientific fact is the opposite of dispassionate. It is an ideological and partisan expression of Republican orthodoxy wholly disconnected from empirical data.

And in case you thought Barrett's zealotry, hypocrisy, and conflicts of interest are only germane to one isolated case, remember that in the coming years, the fossil fuel industry will be asking the high court to shield it from legal consequences for its climate crimes.

[ ... snip ... ]

• [CatholicNewsAgency, 2020-10-27] "One of our own:" Catholic leaders welcome Amy Coney Barrett to Supreme Court

• [resource] Center for Reproductive Rights.



Center for Reproductive Rights: "The stakes couldn't be higher -- We oppose the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
[Image source. Click image to open in new window.]

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• [Statistica.com, 2020-10-12] The Legal Status of Abortion Worldwide.

• [reference] Geneva Consensus Declaration, a Trump administration / International community anti-abortion, anti-feminist initiative, masquerading as pro-women's health.

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• [NPR.org, 2021-04-22] Democrats Ask Justice Barrett To Recuse In Case Involving Nonprofit Donor Privacy

Democratic Members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees are asking U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett to recuse herself from participating in a case involving a conservative nonprofit with ties to a group that gave at least $1 million to fund a "national campaign" to win Senate confirmation of her Supreme Court nomination. ...

... The case, which is to be argued next week, was brought by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP), created by the conservative Koch brothers. It challenges a California law, similar to laws in other states, that requires tax-exempt nonprofits to attach to their state tax filing an IRS form that discloses the identity of their large donors. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation is seeking a broad constitutional ruling that would keep its donor identities secret.

The Democratic lawmakers' letter to Amy Coney Barrett notes that "just minutes after your nomination by former President Trump last September," the AFP Foundation's sister organization, Americans for Progress, announced in a press release that it was mounting a "Full scale campaign to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court." The campaign was characterized as "a significant national ad campaign focusing on eleven states" and that the organization would spend "in the seven figures," - in other words, at least a million dollars. ...

• [ClimateDocket.com, 2021-01-15] Will Amy Coney Barrett, Whose Father Was a Shell Attorney for Decades, Recuse from Climate Suit?

• [TrueNorthResearch.org, 2021-01-14] Justice Barrett's Ties to Shell and API Are Far Deeper Than Reported: Her Father Could Be Deposed in Climate Change Suits.

• [APNews.com, 2020-10-26] Barrett ads tied to interest groups funded by unnamed donors.

The confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States is the culmination of a decadeslong coordinated effort by a constellation of conservative groups, fueled by tens of millions of dollars from wealthy anonymous donors, to tilt the high court farther to the Right.

At the forefront has been the Judicial Crisis Network, which has spent at least $6.3 million in five weeks on national television spots supporting the Republican effort to confirm President Donald Trump's nominee a week before the 2020 United States presidential election. Judicial Crisis Network spent an additional $2.9 million on digital ads, direct mail and text messages supporting Amy Coney Barrett as of 2020-10-26O, according to data obtained by The Associated Press from a conservative advertising firm.

The Judicial Crisis Network ads have touted her background as a law professor turned judge, who is also a mother of seven who models conservative family values. The ads have also sought to frame any questions about her involvement in a charismatic religious community that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage as attacks on her Christian faith.

[ ... snip ... ]

• [DCReport.org, 2020-10-22] Amy Coney Barrett Failed to Disclose Leadership Role in Local Catholic Church. Supreme Court Candidate Chaired a Parish Board for Church Citing "Homosexual Behavior" as an Offense Against the 10 Commandments. ... On the very first page of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's Supreme Court nominee questionnaire, nominees are asked to include an employment record dating back to their college graduation. This would include any affiliation as an officer, director, partner or employee or non-profit organization, with or without pay. ...

• [Accountable.us, 2020-10-12] New Analysis Finds Barrett Sides Against Consumers, Immigrants, Workers, and More. Government Watchdog's Analysis Shows Trump's Nominee to the Supreme Court Sides with Corporations over Consumers, Workers, and Immigrants.

• [PRWatch.org, 2020-10-10] Snapshot of Secret Funding of Amicus Briefs Tied to Leonard Leo -- Federalist Society Leader, Promoter of Amy Barrett. A new review of grant documents, first published on the dark web, provides a snapshot of how groups tied to Leonard A. Leo -- the man who put Amy Barrett on President Trump's list for the Supreme Court - have been secretly funded to file briefs with the Supreme Court to overturn U.S. laws, including the Affordable Care Act.

• [ScheerPost.com, 2020-10-05]  Trump's Barrett Nomination Another Step Toward Christian Fascism.  All fascist and totalitarian movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the veneer of morality.

• [Salon.com, 2020-10-01]  People of Praise: Religious group scrubs photos and mentions of SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett from website: report.  Former members of People of Praise say wives were taught to always obey their husbands -- and provide sex on demand.

• [DemocracyNow.org, 2020-09-23]  People of Praise: Who Is Amy Barrett? Front-Runner to Replace RBG Is Anti-Abortion Member of Patriarchal Catholic Group.

• [DemocracyNow.org, 2020-09-23]  People of Praise: People of Praise: Former Member of Group Tied to SCOTUS Front-Runner Amy Barrett Calls It a "Cult".

• [HRC.org, 2020-09-22] Amy Coney Barrett is an Absolute Threat to LGBTQ Rights. Amy Coney Barrett's history tells a story of anti-LGBTQ ideology [including transphobia], opposing basic rights thought to be settled law, and an anti-choice ideology out of step with popular opinion.

• [SCOTUSblog.com, 2020-09-21] Profile of a potential nominee: Amy Coney Barrett.

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