Conservatives and MAGA loyalists have lashed out at Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, accusing her of being a traitor to President Donald Trump after she helped strike down yet another one of his signature policies.
In a major humiliation for the president, the 54-year-old conservative justice on Tuesday joined forces with Chief Justice John Roberts, fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh and the three liberal justices on the court to strike Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship in America.
But it was Barrett, who has increasingly frustrated Trump’s base over her decisions, that took the most heat.
“I think she is a disaster for the Supreme Court. She is, as I’ve said, a rattle-ball professor with her head up her ass,” said conservative lawyer Mike Davis during a wild tirade with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson.
“She thinks that she thinks that she is the smartest person in the room, and she’s not. She’s the junior varsity justice, and she thinks that she’s grading law school exams instead of exercising sound judgment.”
The 6-3 vote was the second time in as many days that Barrett ruled against Trump, coming merely 24 hours after she helped thwart the president’s bid to change election rules.
Within minutes of the decision, critics of birthright citizenship—which grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in America regardless of their parents’ nationality or immigration status—erupted.
Right-wing commentator and podcaster Matt Walsh referred to her as a “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hire who was “little better than Kentanji Jackson” the liberal justice and first-ever Black woman appointed to the bench.
“Terrible pick,” Walsh added. “When’s the last time we had a Republican president who didn’t put a liberal justice on the court?”
Sean Davis, the editor of conservative web magazine The Federalist, described the justice as Amy “Conehead” Barrett and declared that she and Roberts had “completely destroyed the entire concept of citizenship.”
He did not mention fellow Trump appointee Kavanaugh, who made the unusual decision of siding with the majority for the 6-3 ruling, even though he disagreed with the majority view that Trump’s executive order violated the Constitution.
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Walsh accused Barrett and the other conservatives in the majority of “a tremendous betrayal of the republic.”
“The Justices in the majority have inflamed the all-out assault on our sovereignty and cheapened the sacred value of American citizenship,” he said.
And Davis claimed she “lied” during her Senate confirmation hearing and ought to resign.
The ruling marks the latest flashpoint between Barrett—who was nominated by Trump in 2020—and segments of the president’s political base.
Earlier this year, for instance, Barrett, Roberts and fellow Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch joined the liberal justices to strike down Trump’s signature tariff policy—a move that continues to outrage the president to this day.
“To do this job, you have to be willing to be unpopular,” Barrett acknowledged last year while promoting her book in Washington.
“There’s a little bit of an element of loneliness because you never know who is going to criticize you and who is not. But the job is to tune it out and do the right thing anyway.”
Tuesday’s ruling was a brutal blow to Trump, who had signed an executive order to try to overturn birthright citizenship on the first day of his return to office.
In a sign of how much was at stake, Trump made the unprecedented decision to sit in on oral arguments in April, staring down the court’s nine justices as they quizzed his Solicitor General D. John Sauer.
The right to such citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, but Trump had made it a centerpiece of his immigration policy in a bid to prevent babies born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents from automatically becoming Americans.
But the majority disagreed.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights— to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Roberts wrote.
“We keep that promise today.”
Barrett joined Roberts, Kavanaugh and the liberal justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the majority, while Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented.
On Monday, Barrett also wrote the majority opinion in a 5-4 ruling allowing states to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving afterward.
