Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by President Trump and confirmed by Senate Republicans while voters were in the process of removing Trump from office in 2020. Barrett cemented the right-wing majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, gave Trump virtually complete immunity for lawbreaking he commits as president, and has generally backed Trump’s assault on the rule of law and the federal government. But all that hasn’t been enough for MAGA hardliners.
Earlier this year, far-right commentators were furious that Barrett did not back Trump 100 percent of the time. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in January, right-wing judicial activist Mike Davis viciously attacked Barrett, repeatedly saying she had her “head up her ass” and calling on her to resign.
After Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts voted in March not to immediately overturn a judge’s ruling overturning Trump’s freeze on nearly $2 billion in foreign aid work that had been approved by Congress and already performed, MAGA activist Mike Cernovich denounced her as “evil” and a “DEI hire,” the latter charge echoed by MAGA influencers Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec. Davis went back on Bannon’s show to repeat his vulgar “head up her ass” comment.
In April, when Barrett partially joined more liberal justices’ dissent over Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants to a gulag in El Salvador, the right-wing hate poured in, with Trump’s online pal “catturd” calling her a “commie” and “an ungrateful POS.”
In recent high-profile cases, Barrett has sided with the rest of the MAGA justices to allow mass firings of federal employees and limit federal judges’ ability to halt lawbreaking policies, including Trump’s assertion that he can by executive order overturn the 150-year-old doctrine of birthright citizenship.
Those votes encouraged right-wing radio host John Frederick to ask MAGA lawyer John Eastman this week whether Barrett is “finally coming around.”
“Well, I think there are a lot of plays going on here,” Eastman responded. “One,” he said with a chuckle, “I think she and her family were being threatened. That was serious. I think as a new justice she’s wanting to make sure that everybody knows she’s her own person, so that was serious.”
Eastman said Barrett has “come around” because “the left has gone so far off the rails” with injunctions against Trump administration actions. He said “the greater the absurdity the more she realized that she needed to join” the MAGA majority.
“These judges who disagree with the agenda that the American people voted for don’t have any authority to block the agenda that the American people voted for unless it’s clearly unconstitutional, and it is not.”
Of course, right-wing legal groups had no issue with nationwide injunctions against Biden administration policies, and in fact actively pursued them. Eastman and the Court’s MAGA justices seem to have discovered a new constitutional doctrine now that judges are ruling against Trump’s policies.
Eastman complained that Democrats in the Senate would block any effort to strip federal courts of their jurisdiction over whole classes of cases and that therefore “it’s up to the Supreme Court to get control of the lower courts under its authority.”
Eastman went further in his criticism of the Court’s liberal justices. When Fredericks asked if Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has written powerful dissents, is “becoming a clown,” Eastman suggested that she has been a clown since her confirmation hearing. Even worse, he accused the dissenting justices who defended the constitutional doctrine of birthright citizenship of using “an old Nazi propaganda tactic” by repeatedly noting that it is long-established law.
Eastman said he is “cautiously optimistic” that the Supreme Court will adopt his opposition to birthright citizenship—and overturn more than 150 years of precedent—when it takes up the substance of the issue during its next term.
Eastman, long associated with the hard-right Claremont Institute, was disbarred in California for what judges have deemed his unethical actions in helping Trump try to subvert the 2020 election. Eastman helped challenge results in swing states and promoted a strategy to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to block Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Eastman helped Trump rile up the crowd at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.
