WASHINGTON − Some of President Donald Trump’s loudest supporters have a new diversity, equity and inclusion target: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
The reason?
Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts this week sided with the court’s three liberal justices in backing an order that the Trump administration has to pay foreign aid organizations for work they already performed for the government.
Although Roberts wasn’t targeted, Barrett faced some scathing criticism from the right.
Jack Posobiec, a senior editor at Human Events, a conservative political news and analysis site, called Barrett “a warning against the dangers of Republican DEI.”
“Barrett’s vote didn’t just defy Trump, who gave her the robe,” Posobiec wrote about the fact that Trump nominated Barrett. “It propped up a globalist system conservatives have long despised. That’s not a one-off − it’s a pattern.”
Posobiec noted Barrett’s vote in January rejecting Trump’s request to block the sentencing in his New York hush-money criminal case. And he attacked her dissent in last year’s decision by the court to narrow an obstruction charge used to prosecute rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Amy Kremer, a conservative activist who helped organize the pro-Trump rally that day before the riot, called Barrett “the biggest disappointment on the court” and urged Trump to defy the court’s decision.
“As a woman, I’m ashamed I ever supported her,” Kremer posted on X.
The court has become a crucial backstop for Trump’s controversial agenda because he already enjoys the support of Republicans who control Congress.
Long-time Trump ally Steve Bannon suggested Barrett had given Trump the “stink eye” after shaking hands with him before Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Mike Davis, head of the Article III Project, a conservative legal group, said Barrett was chosen by Trump because he wanted a woman to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat after Ginsburg died in office.
Davis said the former Notre Dame Law School professor was qualified, “but she certainly was not the best pick,” and didn’t have a long track record on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to show how she would vote on the Supreme Court.
Davis also called Barrett a “rattled law professor with her head up her a–.”
Conservatives not from the MAGA wing of the party came to the defense of Barrett, the court’s youngest justice at 53.
“This is nonsense,” Charles C. W. Cooke, a senior editor at National Review wrote. “Barrett is a terrific justice, and, in most cases, those who are criticizing her are forgetting the proper role of the judiciary.”
Cooke said he thinks Barrett got it wrong on the foreign assistance ruling. But he said Barrett’s decision is consistent with her “procedural preferences.” She’s more cautious about deciding when someone can bring a challenge and when they can do so in the emergency lane that Trump chose, he said. Barrett also dislikes deciding a major case when the facts are still emerging, he noted.
“Sometimes, her attachment to her prerequisites is going to benefit the team that appointed her, and sometimes it is not,” Cooke wrote. “Which is the whole point of the judiciary — or at least ought to be.”
Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer who – like Barrett − was once a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, noted all the times Barrett has voted for major conservative causes: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending race-conscious admissions at colleges and overturning a 40-year precedent that made it easier for the federal government to regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and more.
Whelan said on social media he “can’t begin to understand supposed legal conservatives who give Justice Barrett zero credit” for those key votes.
And Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as a White House communications director during Trump’s first administration, said the attacks show that some of Trump’s supporters will look for any perceived disloyalty to declare someone a Republicans-in-name-only (RINO).
“I just didn’t think I would live to see the day that Amy Coney Barrett was declared a RINO by MAGA,” Griffin said on ABC’s “The View.” “This is just wild to me.”
