WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett says “violence or threats of violence” against judges shouldn't be the cost of public service.
But in an interview at the court with The Associated Press about her new book, “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” Barrett was not willing to join other judges who have called on President Donald Trump to tone down rhetoric demonizing judges.
She said there “has been a lot of clear polarization” that has “spilled over into a bad place, spilled into a bad place when it comes to these acts of political violence.”
Along with other justices she said she has received death threats following the court's decision in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade's right to an abortion.
At 53, Barrett is the youngest member of the court. She said she wrote the book, for which she received a reported $2 million advance, to make the nation’s highest court accessible to non-lawyers.
Barrett joined the court in 2020, just over a month after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Trump chose Barrett to replace her. In her book, the Republican president gets just a few mentions, mainly in connection with her nomination and confirmation.
She dealt with the court's 2024 decision that spared Trump from prosecution for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss without even using his name or explaining the decision.
“For example, when a former president was indicted — a historical first — the court took the case to decide whether he could be prosecuted for his official acts,” Barrett wrote. She joined most of Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion.
Even as Barrett writes about political polarization across the country, she does not address what role Trump may have played in it. The book does not deal with events of his second term, which began in January, about when Barrett said she was wrapping up the writing.
The court's consideration of the president and executive power "necessarily has to be detached from the current occupant of the office because ... the court has to think about things in the context of the broad sweep of history, of the presidents who have come before and the presidents who will come later. And so the court in deciding cases about executive power, it really is focused on the presidency rather than the president,” Barrett said.
In the interview and in subsequent public appearances, Barrett downplayed the idea that the nation is facing a constitutional crisis or dealing with unprecedented events.
“It’s hard to say when you look over all of history that there haven’t been times in which that disagreement has been even more acute,” she said, listing the Civil War, Vietnam war protests and the Great Depression.
The book is being published Tuesday by Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Random House.
Barrett wrote clearly on two topics that suggest some disagreement with the president. Trump signed an executive order last month requiring the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute people for burning the American flag, despite a 1989 high court decision protecting the act as political speech.
Barrett wrote admiringly of the free-speech votes of Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, for whom she once worked, despite their personal distaste for burning the flag.
Without reference to Trump and his musings about seeking a third presidential term, Barrett also noted the clarity of the two-term limit added to the Constitution in 1951.
“That clear imperative — now memorialized in our binding law — leaves no room for second-guessing," she wrote.
Barrett was the last of Trump's three appointees to join the court, cementing a conservative supermajority that has moved quickly to undo the constitutional right to abortion, end affirmative action in education, expand gun rights and make it harder to sustain government regulations. In a series of emergency orders this year, Barrett has mainly been in the majority to allow Trump to move ahead with plans to remake the federal government, even after lower-court judges have found some of his actions likely illegal.
The decision to overturn Roe hinged on Barrett's vote. At the time, she was the junior justice and the last to vote when the court met in a private conference following arguments.
In all likelihood, when it came her turn to speak, the court would have been split 4 to 4 on the central question of overturning nearly 50 years of high court precedent.
Asked about the moment in the interview, Barrett said only, “What happens in conference stays in conference.”
A mother of seven and the only woman in the majority, Barrett joined Justice Samuel Alito's opinion, but she did not contribute a separate opinion as several of her colleagues did.
“I write when I feel like there’s something that I can contribute because there’s something that was left unsaid that I think is important to say methodologically,” she said.
The court does not often undo its past decisions, and Barrett said the current court does so less frequently than its predecessors.
“It’s not surprising the court has always overturned cases," she said. "So it’s not surprising that the court, you know, it’s a human institution institution and humans make mistakes.”
So Roe was a mistake, she was asked.
Alito's opinion “describes where ... Roe went wrong in interpreting the due process clause. So you don’t overrule precedent without concluding that that precedent was mistaken about the law in some respect,” Barrett said.
In the book, Barrett offered a defense of the decision.
“If the Constitution places a matter beyond the reach of democratic majorities, the Court must vigilantly and fearlessly enforce that choice. Otherwise, the Court must leave the matter to the democratic process, which requires citizens to persuade one another rather than a handful of Supreme Court justices,” she wrote. “These points animate the Court's reasoning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which holds that the Constitution leaves the regulation of abortion to the democratic process.”
As she approaches the five-year anniversary of her confirmation, Barrett said the biggest changes in her life deal with ever-present security and that “you can never feel completely free.”
Last week, Barrett said she passed on dancing at a wedding until the very end, when Aretha Franklin's “Respect” began to play. “I just started kind of twirling around my niece a little bit, and all of a sudden I see my sister take off across the floor, and somebody had a phone out and they were recording me,” Barrett said. “She went up, and she said, ‘I want you to delete that.’”
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