Amy Coney Barrett and the Court of Disappointed Hopes

I had great hopes for Amy Coney Barrett. Those hopes, I regret to say, have been disappointed by her tenure so far.

At her nomination to the Supreme Court by President Trump in 2020, I was encouraged by a speech she had given to fledgling lawyers at Notre Dame, reminding them that “a legal career is but a means to an end … and that end is the building of the Kingdom of God.” I hoped that her religious passion and legal brilliance might lead the Court away from progressive jurisprudence, away from “legal realism,” and toward more attention to the maintenance of the rule of law.

I hoped that Associate Justice Barrett and the seating on the bench of two other Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, would lead the Court back to the original understanding of the Constitution. A Constitution originally undergirded by the Christian religion and morality and defined by its structure of separation of powers, under which judges judged but did not legislate. And one restrained by federalism, limiting the powers of the national government to those expressly authorized in our founding document, and leaving the rest to the states.

In short, I looked for Barrett to further the jurisprudence of the man she clerked for, Antonin Scalia, and I hoped she would join Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in what I saw as a quest to restore the Constitution in Exile.