Crossroads -- Gray Lady is puzzled about Amy Coney Barrett

Yes, there are Catholic-shaped holes in that important New York Times feature

When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, it wasn’t all that surprising when her Notre Dame Law School colleagues offered high praise for her work.

Earlier, when she was nominated to the 7th Circuit in Chicago, every single member of that faculty signed an endorsement letter stating, in part: “Amy is a role model for all of us, and will be a model of the fair, impartial, and sympathetic judge."

Backing her SCOTUS bid, law school Dean Marcus Cole described her as an “absolutely brilliant legal scholar and jurist. She is also one of the most popular teachers we have ever had here at Notre Dame Law School." News reports noted that Barrett was named distinguished professor of the year by law-school graduating classes — three times.

Back in 2020, Republicans often stressed that Barrett drew strong support from liberals, as well as conservatives, with whom she had worked in the past. Now, in 2025, it appears that the legal left has started paying attention.

During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, host Todd Wilken and I discussed a nuanced New York Times feature that explored Barrett’s work on the high court under this double-decker headline:

How Amy Coney Barrett Is Confounding the Right and the Left

President Trump appointed her to clinch a conservative legal revolution. But soon after arriving at the Supreme Court, she began surprising her colleagues.

In other words, the Times, and some of the legal liberals quoted in the piece, appear to be making a similar case to the one made by many legal conservatives who backed her nomination.

Here’s another way of thinking about this puzzle: It’s almost impossible to pin simplistic political labels on the worldview of orthodox Catholic intellectuals.

Thus, Wilken and I thought it was interesting that the Times team devoted little attention to Barrett’s faith and her history as a conservative Catholic — topics that have been of great interest in the past. Readers may recall 2020 headlines such as “Inside the People of Praise, the Tight-Knit Faith Community of Amy Coney Barrett,” and “Rooted in Faith, Amy Coney Barrett Represents a New Conservatism.”

The Big Idea in much of the elite 2020 reporting was that Barrett was the poster princess of the Religious Right, a fringe Charismatic Catholic believer akin to those scary evangelicals. Alas, she was not a safe American Catholic, like Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi.

Then there was this dramatic moment, which was noted in the Times piece:

During Senate confirmation hearings Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked her a maladroit question about her Catholicism. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” the senator said, implying that her rulings would flow from Rome. It was insulting — and lucky.

The nominee became an instant lodestar for religious women. The White House counsel’s team made mugs emblazoned with her face and Ms. Feinstein’s words.

Politicos on left and right embraced the “dogma” catchphrase. The bottom line, as stated in the omniscient voice of New York Times paraphrase: “Partisans said she stood for their greatest hopes or worst fears. She was confirmed without a single Democratic vote.”

In 2025, the Times found plenty of evidence that more than a few political conservatives have changed their minds.

Supporting that strong headline, the story quoted some political conservatives who have been infuriated by some of her SCOTUS votes, especially on strategic cases linked to executive powers claimed by President Donald Trump.

This passage was especially blunt:

Some of Mr. Trump’s allies have turned on her, accusing the justice of being a turncoat and calling her — a mother of seven, with two Black children adopted from Haiti — a “D.E.I. hire.” Her young son asked why she had a bulletproof vest, she said in a speech last year, and her extended family has been threatened, including with pizza deliveries that convey a warning: We know where you live.

“We had too much hope for her,” Mike Davis, a right-wing legal activist with close ties to the Trump administration, said in a recent interview. “She doesn’t have enough courage.”

This spring, on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast, he tore into her in such crude terms, even mocking the size of her family. …

Once again, the Times didn’t explore the possibility that Barrett’s cautious, academic approach to the law may be linked to her Catholic beliefs. It would have been easy to have found authoritative voices — on the Catholic left, as well as the right — to address this topic.

The key: Barrett truly believes that her work, and her vocation, should focus on matters of law, not politics. I appreciated this reference:

Justice Barrett has favored a more deliberate approach than some of her colleagues. In classroom lectures, she used to say that the country had bound itself to the Constitution the way Odysseus had tied himself to the mast of his ship, to resist whatever political sirens swam up.

The story also stressed that Barrett has consistently worked to build bridges, personal and intellectual, to justices on the high court’s left wing. The Times supported this claim with strong analysis, from academic sources, of Barrett’s voting patterns and her logic in court decisions.

This left me wondering: Is it possible that her work has played a role, behind the scenes, in some landmark 9-0 SCOTUS rulings — consider this, this and now this case — on religious liberty and the First Amendment?

Perhaps Barrett will address some of these issues in her own book that is scheduled for September release. The Times noted:

According to several people who have read drafts of the book, “Listening to the Law,” she is trying to bring the public inside the court, show how it works and how she decides cases.

In major ones, Justice Barrett has been in the majority more than any of her colleagues, a measure of her rising influence.

I’ll end with what I think are three of the most important quotations in the Times feature:

“When I think of Amy, I think of someone deeply devoted to family and faith, who does not seek out the limelight, who is humble and just wants to quietly do the work,” said Amanda Tyler, a law professor at Berkeley, former clerk to Justice Ginsburg and longtime friend to Justice Barrett.

Then there is this:

“It’s a mistake by ignorant conservatives and wishful liberals to believe she’s moderating,” said Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who befriended her when they clerked at the court. Like others who know her, he said that both the right and the left had misread her. “She’s exactly the person I met 25 years ago: principled, absolutely conservative, not interested in shifting.”

And finally there was this reference to a conservative hero:

Though Justice Scalia, her mentor, is remembered as a leader of the legal right, he also surprised the public at times. He famously signed onto an opinion that said burning the American flag was protected by the Constitution.

“Justice Scalia used to say, and I wholeheartedly agree, that if you find yourself liking the results of every decision that you make, you’re in the wrong job,” Justice Barrett said in 2024. “You should sometimes be reaching results that you really dislike because it’s not your job to just be deciding cases in the way that you’d like them to be seen.”

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