Is Justice Barrett being a true independant?

To her credit, I suspect she doesn't identify as a member of a tribe but as someone who tries to follow the law, wherever it takes her.

I wish her luck.

A JUSTICE APART

By Jodi Kantor, NY Times

June 16, 2025

I’m an investigative reporter focused on the Supreme Court.

Two years ago, while reporting a story about how the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion, I discovered something surprising about Justice Amy Coney Barrett. In a secret internal vote about whether to hear the case, she had voted no.

This was unexpected. President Trump appointed Barrett to cinch a 50-year conservative legal revolution. A mother of seven, she is on the record as an abortion opponent. And she voted for the ultimate verdict in Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning the federal right to abortion.

But her initial reluctance about the case was a clue that Barrett is a more independent figure than the stalwart that many on the right or the left believed her to be. With much of Trump’s agenda headed to the court eventually, she’s not necessarily the safe vote he wants. She is the Republican appointee who has voted most often against Trump’s position.

I spent this spring interviewing Barrett’s friends and colleagues as well as people from the court; examining her many years of speeches; and, with the help of scholars, analyzing her voting record. Read the full story. Here are some of the things I learned.

Leftward drift

Barrett is changing, and a new analysis of her record shows how. She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome.

Or take cases in which liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan voted together. In Barrett’s first term, she was aligned with them only 39 percent of the time (this was in nonunanimous cases for which the justices heard arguments). This term she was aligned with them 82 percent of the time.

But Justice Barrett is still very conservative. She helped end federal affirmative action and expand gun rights. When she breaks for the liberal side, it’s rarely in a marquee case.

Opposing Trump

So far, Barrett’s record on Trump-related votes is short but suggestive. Usually, justices show what scholars call “appointment bias,” leaning slightly in favor of the presidents who install them on the bench. Emergency orders are tentative, and not every vote is disclosed. But she has gone in the other direction.

Trump has privately complained about her, according to two people familiar with his thinking. On a podcast this spring, Mike Davis, a close Trump ally who once clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch, tore into her in such crude terms that Gorsuch later called to reprimand him, according to people aware of the exchange.

Differences with a colleague

Differences between Barrett and Justice Samuel Alito arose in her earliest days on the court. In the first major argument she heard, he tried to expand the role of religion in public life. She declined to go along. Next, he wanted to overturn the Affordable Care Act; she voted no on procedural grounds. Alito wanted to hear the abortion case, and she didn’t. In a patent case later that term, they wrote dueling dissents both claiming that Justice Scalia would have favored their positions.

For five years, that debate has continued about how far and how fast to go. Alito, 75, is in a hurry to take advantage of the six-seat conservative majority. Barrett, who at 53 is likely to have a long future at the court, is cautious and controlled. He barely disguises his annoyance when the other conservatives don’t go along with him, and he sometimes vents in epically long opinions.

After Barrett’s second term, her agreement on outcomes with Alito slid from 80 percent to 62 percent.

A justice without a team

On the court, Barrett sits somewhat apart from the others. Her signature move is joining only slices of her colleagues’ opinions, agreeing with some bits but not others. Even when she agrees with the supermajority, she sometimes argues some of the justices took the wrong route. (One person from the court called her the Hermione Granger of the conservatives, telling the men they’re doing it wrong.)

Barrett, a longtime academic, initially wasn’t sure she wanted to be a judge. She still calls herself “a law professor to my bones.” Among the nine members of the court, she is the least experienced judge and the youngest. The one justice not educated at Harvard or Yale, she is a foreigner to the power-player Beltway posts that shaped most of the others.

In speeches, she has told striking, and sometimes personal, stories about family, faith, the law and the enormous transition she has been through.