Justice Amy Coney Barrett says the Supreme Court shouldn’t be in the business of pushing its own agenda on the American people. That’s a curious statement from a justice who voted to wipe out a half-century-old constitutional right to abortion.
In her first televised interview since joining the Court in 2020, Barrett sat down with CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell to promote her upcoming memoir “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.” The interview airs this Sunday, but already, Barrett’s comments are drawing sharp scrutiny — and not just from liberals.
“It’s not just an opinion poll about whether the Supreme Court thinks something is good or whether the Supreme Court thinks something is bad,” Barrett told O’Donnell. “What the court is trying to do is see what the American people have decided.”
“The Court should not be imposing its own values on the American people — that’s for the democratic process,” she added.
The same democratic process, critics point out, that was stripped of its ability to protect abortion rights nationwide when Barrett and her fellow conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a decision that blew a crater through five decades of established precedent and tossed the issue back to the states.
Barrett, one of three justices nominated by Donald Trump during his single term, insists the court is misunderstood. “I think people who criticize the court or who are outside say a lot of different things,” she told O’Donnell. “But again, the point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out.”
It’s a tone-deaf defense to many Americans still reeling from the Dobbs decision, which has resulted in abortion bans or severe restrictions in more than a dozen states — often with little regard for public opinion or the health consequences faced by women.
Barrett’s attempt to draw a distinction between different types of rights may not do much to ease those concerns. In her book, she argues that the right to marry, engage in sexual intimacy, use birth control, and raise children are “fundamental.” But when it comes to running a business, dying by suicide, or terminating a pregnancy? Not so much.
“I was a con law professor for many years,” she told O’Donnell. “I described the doctrine in the book, and that is the state of the law.”
That “state of the law” could soon be back in flux. When Dobbs was decided, Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t hold back. In his concurring opinion, he called on the Court to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” explicitly naming cases that enshrined the rights to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), same-sex intimacy (Lawrence v. Texas), and marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges).
That has many, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sounding the alarm.
“It took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Clinton said in a podcast interview last month. “The Supreme Court will hear a case about gay marriage; my prediction is they will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion — they will send it back to the states.”
“American voters, and to some extent the American media, don’t understand how many years the Republicans have been working in order to get us to this point,” she added.
And it’s a point they’ve reached with Barrett’s help. She joined Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice Roberts in a 6-3 decision that demolished federal abortion protections. The fallout hasn’t stopped since.
Now, as Barrett attempts to shape her public image and push a message of judicial restraint, critics see a justice trying to rebrand the consequences of her own decisions.
It’s a tough sell. When you’ve helped bulldoze Roe, claiming you don’t want to “impose values” on Americans sounds less like humility — and more like revisionism.
Watch the clip below from CBS News:
