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Margaret Talbot | Amy Coney Barrett's Long Game
Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "The newest Supreme Court Justice isn't just another conservative - she's the product of a Christian legal movement that is intent on remaking America."
The newest Supreme Court Justice isn’t just another conservative—she’s the product of a Christian legal movement that is intent on remaking America.
On December 1st, the Supreme Court had its day of oral argument in a landmark abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, brought by the State of Mississippi. It was the first case that the Court had taken in thirty years in which the petitioners were explicitly asking the Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which affirmed that decision in 1992. If anyone needed a reminder that, whatever the Justices decide in Dobbs, it will not reconcile the American divide over abortion, the chaotic scene outside the Court made it clear. At the base of the marble steps, reproductive-rights supporters held a large rally in which they characterized abortion as a human right—and an act of health care. Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic U.S. representative from Washington State, described herself as “one of the one in four women in America who have had an abortion,” adding, “Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but it was my choice.” Jayapal could barely be heard, though, over the anti-abortion protesters who had also gathered, in even greater numbers. The day was sunny and mild, and though some of these demonstrators offered the usual angry admonishments—“God is going to punish you, murderer!” a man with a megaphone declaimed—most members of the anti-abortion contingent seemed buoyant. Busloads of students from Liberty University, an evangelical college in Lynchburg, Virginia, snapped selfies in their matching red-white-and-blue jackets. Penny Nance, the head of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, exclaimed, “This is our moment! This is why we’ve marched all these years!”
A major reason for Nance’s optimism was the presence on the bench of Amy Coney Barrett, the former Notre Dame law professor and federal-court judge whom President Donald Trump had picked to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on September 18, 2020. With the help of Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, Trump had accelerated Barrett’s nomination process, and the Senate confirmed her just a week before the 2020 Presidential election. As a candidate in the 2016 election, Trump had vowed to appoint Justices who would overturn Roe, and as President he had made it a priority to stock the judiciary with conservative judges—especially younger ones. According to an analysis by the law professors David Fontana, of the George Washington University, and Micah Schwartzman, of the University of Virginia, Trump’s nominees to the federal courts of appeals—bodies that, like the Supreme Court, confer lifetime tenure—were the youngest of any President’s “since at least the beginning of the 20th century.” Trump made three Supreme Court appointments, and Neil Gorsuch (forty-nine when confirmed) and Brett Kavanaugh (fifty-three) were the youngest of the nine Justices until Barrett was sworn in, at the age of forty-eight. Her arrival gave the conservative wing of the Court a 6–3 supermajority—an imbalance that won’t be altered by the recent news that one of the three liberal Justices, Stephen Breyer, is retiring.
Barrett has a hard-to-rattle temperament. A fitness enthusiast seemingly blessed with superhuman energy, she is rearing seven children with her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former prosecutor now in private practice. At her confirmation hearings, she dressed with self-assurance—a fitted magenta dress; a ladylike skirted suit in unexpected shades of purple—and projected an air of decorous, almost serene diligence. Despite her pro-forma circumspection, her answers on issues from guns to climate change left little doubt that she would feel at home on a Court that is more conservative than it’s been in decades. Yet she also represented a major shift. Daniel Bennett, a professor at John Brown University, a Christian college in Arkansas, who studies the intersection of faith and politics, told me that Barrett is “more embedded in the conservative Christian legal movement than any Justice we’ve ever had.” Outside the Court, Nance emphasized this kinship, referring to Barrett as “Sister Amy, on the inside.”
In recent years, conservatives have been intent on installing judges who will not disappoint by becoming more centrist over time. Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy sided with liberal Justices in a few notable cases, including ones that allowed same-sex marriage and upheld Roe. David Souter, who had become a federal judge just months before President George H. W. Bush nominated him to the Court, in 1990, moved leftward enough that “No More Souters” became a conservative slogan. A decade ago, Chief Justice John Roberts committed the unpardonable sin of providing a critical vote to keep the Affordable Care Act in place. In 2020, the seemingly stalwart Gorsuch delivered a blow, writing the majority opinion in a case which held that civil-rights legislation protected gay and transgender workers from discrimination. On the Senate floor, Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who later attempted to discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential election, declared that Gorsuch’s opinion marked the end of “the conservative legal project as we know it”—the “originalist” jurisprudence, prominent since the nineteen-eighties, that claims to be guided by the textual intent of the Founding Fathers. It was time, Hawley said, for “religious conservatives to take the lead.” Four months later, that new era unofficially began, when Barrett joined the Court.
For decades, leading members of the Federalist Society and other conservative legal associations have vetted potential appellate judges and Justices and provided recommendations to Republican Presidents. The Federalist Society has traditionally showcased judges with records of high academic distinction, often at élite schools; service in Republican Administrations; originalist loyalties; and a record of decisions on the side of deregulation and corporations. Barrett hadn’t served in an Administration, and, unlike the other current Justices, she hadn’t attended an Ivy League law school. She went to Notre Dame, and returned there to teach. These divergences, though, ended up becoming points in her favor—especially at a time when religious activists were playing a more influential role in the conservative legal movement. Notre Dame, which is just outside South Bend, Indiana, is a Catholic institution in a deeply red state, and it’s one of the relatively few well-respected law schools where progressives do not abound. Barrett’s grounding in conservative Catholicism, and even her large family, began to seem like qualifications, too. Andrew Lewis, a University of Cincinnati political scientist who studies faith-based advocacy, told me that religious conservatives often used to feel “looked down upon by some of the original Federalist Society members.” But, he went on, “they have increasingly gained power, and their concerns have become more central to the project.”
To some of Barrett’s champions, her life story also offered a retort to the kind of liberal feminism they abhorred. When I asked Nance what she most admired about Barrett, she replied, in an e-mail, “Amy Coney Barrett is a brilliant, accomplished jurist who also happens to be a mother of 7 serving on the highest court in the land. She decimates the argument that women can’t do both, or that women need abortion to ‘live their best lives.’ ” (Barrett declined my request for an interview.)
In public appearances before her nomination, Barrett was pleasant, non-ideological, and disciplined to the point of blandness. Yet her background and her demeanor suggested to social conservatives that, if placed on the Court, she would deliver what they wanted, expanding gun rights and religious liberties, and dumping Roe. In a recent memoir, Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, a hard-line conservative, unflatteringly describes Brett Kavanaugh as “an establishment-friendly nominee” who had served in the George W. Bush White House. Meadows writes that Trump, who had almost nominated Barrett in 2018, was exasperated by Kavanaugh’s performance at his confirmation hearings—not because he had to fend off sexual-assault accusations but because the sometimes tearful nominee had appeared “weak.” Picking a conventional Beltway guy had led to disappointment, and “the President was determined not to make the same mistake twice.” According to the memoir, Barrett didn’t “miss a beat” during her first meeting with Trump, assuring him that she would follow the Constitution and that she could handle attacks from liberals. Meadows was struck by “her commitment to her faith and to conservative ideals.” When she made a pre-confirmation tour of Senate offices, he trusted her to do so without the aid of a “sherpa”—typically a former senator who helps break the ice.
In the religious magazine First Things, Patrick Deneen, a colleague of Barrett’s at Notre Dame, wrote that she had developed a useful kind of cultural insulation, or armor. He extolled her upbringing in Louisiana (“the state with the highest percentage of native-born residents”) and her immersion in the Catholic community in and around South Bend—sometimes known, he said, as “Catholic Disneyland.” There, a “minivan full of siblings” was just a “regular family.” With Barrett, the nation was getting “the first justice to receive her law degree from a Catholic university,” and someone who had “spent almost her entire life in the ‘flyover’ places of America where ‘gentry liberalism’ is not the dominant fashion.” Barrett might “acclimate” to the cosmopolitan secularism of Washington, D.C., Deneen said, but “there is hope her entire life story to date will make her resistant to that fate.”
In public, most conservatives deride the notion that a jurist’s cultural background might influence her decisions, let alone make her a better judge. At Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, in 2009, Republican senators denounced her for having argued, in a speech, that “a wise Latina” might fruitfully draw on her life experience—in her case, as a Puerto Rican New Yorker—in her jurisprudence. But many conservatives were eager to spotlight Barrett’s identity, because it suggested an imperviousness to public-opinion polls and the disapproval of coastal élites. Nance told me that, on a “Women for Amy” bus tour that she had organized to generate enthusiasm for Barrett’s confirmation, “older women in particular would come up to us with tears in their eyes saying that they have been waiting their whole lives for a conservative woman to be appointed to the court.” (O’Connor, Ronald Reagan’s appointee, who helped forge the compromise in Casey that preserved abortion rights, apparently didn’t count.)
On the day of oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, loudspeakers outside the Court broadcast the proceedings, and some people in the crowd surged closer to listen. (Because of pandemic restrictions, the courtroom was closed to the public.) Breyer, Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the three liberal Justices, expressed concern that overturning the long-standing precedents of Roe and Casey could severely undermine the principle of stare decisis—adherence to past rulings on which citizens have come to rely—and make it look as though the Court were reversing course because there’d been a change in personnel. Sotomayor was especially blunt: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception, that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”
Veteran observers of the Court often remind the rest of us not to leap to conclusions on the basis of oral arguments—the Justices might just be testing out ideas. But many journalists and legal academics saw this session as easier to parse than others. The conservative wing—Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas—seemed inclined to uphold Mississippi’s ban on virtually all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, undoing Roe’s guarantee of legal abortion up to the point of fetal viability. (Doctors currently consider a fetus viable at about twenty-four weeks.) The remaining question was whether a majority of the conservatives would accept Mississippi’s request to throw out Roe and Casey altogether. Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch appeared ready to do so. Kavanaugh—who had been less of a sure bet going in—also seemed to be on board, noting that previous Justices had overturned precedents after concluding that their predecessors had been wrong; he invoked Plessy v. Ferguson and other infamous decisions. Roberts seemed to be looking, as he often does, for a narrower ruling—a way to find the Mississippi law constitutional without obliterating Roe.
When it was Barrett’s turn, she paid respect to the “benefits of stare decisis,” but also emphasized that “it’s not an inexorable command, and that there are some circumstances in which overruling is possible.” She then proposed that the Court’s opinion in Casey had relied on “a different conception of stare decisis insofar as it very explicitly took into account public reaction.” The implication was that the Justices in 1992 had been too attuned to momentary political fluctuations. She wondered aloud if the Court, going forward, should “minimize that factor.” As Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and an expert on abortion law, told me later, “Barrett didn’t seem as obviously ready to get rid of Roe as some of the others. . . . But if you were betting, and oral argument was the evidence you had, it would sure look like they had the votes to overturn it.”
Barrett devoted more of her time to a line of questioning that was not especially jurisprudential—and not one which any other Justice likely would have pursued. Speaking politely, in her youthful-sounding voice, she began asking about “safe haven” laws, which allow a person who has just given birth to leave the baby—anonymously, with no questions asked—at a fire station or some other designated spot. States began passing such legislation in 1999. (Some legislators found the idea appealing partly because it was about saving babies and partly because—unlike programs that subsidize child care or help beleaguered parents in many other ways—safe havens generally cost little to set up.) Barrett seemed to be implying that such laws posed a feasible alternative to abortion. In a colloquy with Julie Rikelman, who represented Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the only abortion clinic in Mississippi—Barrett noted that safe-haven laws existed in all fifty states, adding, “Both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting, and, insofar as you . . . focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it’s also focussed on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don’t the safe-haven laws take care of that problem?” Pregnancy itself, Barrett went on, might impose a temporary burden on the mother, but if you could relinquish the baby you could avoid the burden of parenthood. And, in a peculiar sideswipe, she described pregnancy as “an infringement on bodily autonomy . . . like vaccines,” a comment that seemingly built on anti-vaxxers’ appropriation of pro-choice rhetoric to make a novel suggestion: that being required by your employer to get a shot against a deadly communicable disease is somehow equivalent to being forced to give birth.
Rikelman responded that carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term and placing the infant up for adoption had always been an option, even if safe-haven laws were new since Casey. But pregnancy itself had an impact on women—on “their ability to care for other children” and “their ability to work.” The health risks, too, could be “alarmingly high,” Rikelman noted: “It’s seventy-five times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi than it is to have a pre-viability abortion, and those risks are disproportionately threatening the lives of women of color.” Barrett pressed on: “Are you saying that the right, as you conceive of it, is grounded primarily in the bearing of the child, in the carrying of a pregnancy, and not so much looking forward into the consequences on professional opportunities and work life and economic burdens?” Rikelman said that the answer was clearly both.
Ziegler, of Florida State, explained to me, “If a Justice returns to the same point, it’s not just a passing-the-time kind of question—it’s more of an actual preoccupation. Barrett is already a symbol of a certain kind of conservative feminist, a hero to that community the way R.B.G. was for liberal feminists.” Since Barrett joined the Court, “this was the first sign we’ve had that maybe she shares these specific views of people in that community, along with embodying a kind of ideal for them.”
Barrett certainly knows something about adoption: she and Jesse adopted two of their children from an orphanage in Haiti. She has spoken about their daughter Vivian coming to South Bend as a malnourished fourteen-month-old, and about their son John Peter arriving soon after the 2010 earthquake. Yet her remarks about safe havens sounded oddly naïve about other people’s experiences of family, childbearing, and adoption. She made no reference to the fact that pregnancy and childbirth pose more health dangers to women than legal abortion does—or that the majority of women who have abortions already have children at home, which means that safeguarding the health of those women protects their living children. Barrett also appeared to assume that people who relinquish their infants will no longer be implicated in any sort of relationship with them.
Marley Greiner, a co-founder of the advocacy organization Bastard Nation, told me that many advocates for adoptees are skeptical of safe-haven laws, because they can make it much harder for potential adoptees to obtain birth certificates and health information connected to their family history, or to contact their biological parents in the future. Moreover, when an infant is dropped off anonymously, it’s extremely difficult to tell if someone has been coerced into doing so. Greiner explained, “There is no simple mechanism for the surrendering parent—much less a non-surrendering parent or a relative who suspects or knows that a safe-havening took place—to attempt to legally challenge or rescind the surrender.” Nobody wants desperate people to be leaving newborns in dumpsters, but there are few reliable statistics about neonaticide, and it’s uncertain whether safe-haven laws do much to alleviate the problem.
A kind of magical thinking animates a belief in these laws as a panacea for unwanted pregnancy. Giving up an infant for adoption is rare in the United States—according to the National Council for Adoption, about eighteen thousand infants are voluntarily relinquished each year. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that, in 2019, more than six hundred thousand abortions were performed.) And the number of unmarried teen-agers who carry a pregnancy to term and give the baby up is much lower than it was in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when safe and legal abortion was not an option. Laury Oaks, a professor at U.C. Santa Barbara who has written a book about safe-haven laws, told me that the first one to pass, in Texas, was called the Baby Moses Law—a name that carried Biblical connotations and conjured an idealized image of noble protectors.
It’s not clear what inspired Barrett’s questions about safe-haven laws. The brief filed by Mississippi in 2021 makes only a passing mention of them, and dozens of amicus briefs filed on behalf of Mississippi don’t cite them at all. But two briefs filed by relatively obscure organizations offer sunny assessments of safe havens as an antidote to abortion. A brief from the Justice Foundation, a Texas-based litigation firm that handles anti-abortion cases, contends that “as a matter of law, there are no more ‘unwanted’ children in America because of the major change in circumstances known as Safe Haven laws,” adding, “Even if states ban or restrict abortions completely, or if only one clinic exists in a state, no woman would have to care for a baby if she does not have the desire or ability to do so.” Reason for Life, a Christian ministry in Palmdale, California, filed a brief arguing that the safe-haven approach “gives loving couples a chance to realize their long-awaited dream of welcoming a baby into their hearts and homes,” while also providing “mothers a way to put childrearing responsibilities behind them almost instantaneously.” The Reason for Life brief is credited, in part, to three lawyers at Boyden Gray … Associates, a boutique firm in Washington, D.C.; one of them, Michael Buschbacher, was a law student of Barrett’s at Notre Dame.
Many Court observers found Barrett’s focus on safe havens perplexing. But, when I asked Nance what she had appreciated about Barrett’s performance on the Court thus far, she highlighted that moment. Barrett “astutely brought up the topic of adoption in the abortion context at oral arguments,” she said. “We welcome the broadening of the issues in the abortion conversation.”
Barrett’s personal views on abortion are no mystery. In 2006, she signed her name to a two-page ad, placed in the South Bend Tribune by the group St. Joseph County Right to Life, that defended “the right to life from fertilization to natural death” and declared that it was “time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” In 2015, she signed an open letter to Catholic bishops affirming the Church’s traditional teachings on gender roles, divorce, and the sanctity of life. She was a member of the Notre Dame Chapter of University Faculty for Life, which, in 2016, unanimously voted to condemn Notre Dame’s decision to award then Vice-President Joe Biden a medal for “outstanding service to Church and society.” The honor was “a scandalous violation of the University’s moral responsibility,” the group said, because Biden, a Catholic, supports the right to abortion. “Saying that Mr. Biden rejects Church teaching could make it sound like he is merely disobeying the rules of his religious group. But the Church’s teaching about the sanctity of life is true.”
At Barrett’s confirmation hearing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in 2017, and again three years later, when she was nominated to the Supreme Court, she declined to say whether she believes that Roe was a mistake. (At the earlier hearing, she allowed that it “had been affirmed many times.”) At the 2020 hearings, when Senator Dianne Feinstein pressed her to discuss Roe, Barrett refused. “It would actually be wrong and a violation of the canons for me to do that as a sitting judge,” she chided. “If I express a view on a precedent one way or another, whether I say I love it or I hate it, it signals to litigants that I might tilt one way or another in a pending case.” Other nominees to the Court have taken a similar tack, but Barrett’s previous unambiguous commitments on the abortion issue—and her willingness to stand up publicly for them in the recent past—gave her answers a particularly surreal air. She ceded more ground to Senator Amy Klobuchar, acknowledging that she did not view Roe as a “super-precedent”—a case, like Brown v. Board of Education or Marbury v. Madison, that is so well settled that essentially no one calls for it to be overturned.
During the oral argument in Dobbs, Justice Kagan challenged the idea that Roe is not a bedrock case. Overturning it, she suggested, would be profoundly disruptive, because the vast majority of American women have spent their entire adult lives under its protection. “There’s been fifty years of water under the bridge, fifty years of decisions saying that this is part of our law,” she said. “This is part of the fabric of women’s existence in this country.”
Barrett insists that her personal beliefs are irrelevant to her judging. She describes herself as an originalist, like her mentor Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked on the Court, in the late nineties. At the Rose Garden ceremony where Trump introduced Barrett—a public-relations triumph, despite the fact that it became a covid superspreader event—she said that Scalia’s “judicial philosophy is mine,” adding, “A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold.”
Originalists contend that their forensic examinations of the Constitution and other foundational texts constrain them from imposing their preferences. A true originalist, it is said, sometimes arrives at a conclusion whose results she personally doesn’t like. Scalia was a blustery, patriotic traditionalist who openly disdained what he called “sandal-wearing, bearded weirdos who go around burning flags.” Yet in 1989 he sided with the majority in a 5–4 decision holding that the First Amendment protected the right to burn a flag in protest. “That was very painful for Justice Scalia,” Barrett said, in a talk five years ago. In a 2019 lecture, she noted that, as a judge on the Seventh Circuit, her originalist approach had led her to dissent in a Second Amendment case in which the other judges had concluded that nonviolent felons could be denied the right to own a gun. Perhaps because conservatives are generally not very rights-oriented when it comes to felons, she argued that her position might seem “radical” to some. (To others, her dissent might seem in keeping with a rigid conservative allegiance to gun rights.)
An originalist reading is still an act of interpretation, not a chemical test in which a jurist applies a formula and the answer pops up. Legal methodology and political ideology are not easy to disentangle—they often come in a package. Most originalists are conservatives, and most conservative jurists and legal scholars are originalists. The approach, with its faithfulness to the literal meaning of a legal text, has a fundamentalist cast, and its fealty to the Founding Fathers has an old-school patriotic gleam. Lee Epstein, a law professor at Washington University who studies the behavior of judges, told me, “They can talk about their legalistic analysis, but history and text can be read multiple ways, and their values are going to come into play—you can’t get around it.” In a recent article on the Supreme Court’s decisions in religion cases, Epstein and her co-author, Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago, observe, “Numerous studies have found that a judge’s religious affiliation is correlated with voting outcomes, usually in predicted directions—with religious judges usually being more pro-religion than non-religious judges, and judges of various religions taking positions that are consistent with the theological or institutional claims of their faith.”
For those of us who are not doctrinaire originalists, Epstein’s observation sounds like common sense. It’s hard to accept that a judge who views abortion as the slaughter of innocents (or who considers it a linchpin of women’s freedom) can easily banish such a conviction. It’s less a matter of bad faith than of a limit on the human capacity to compartmentalize core values. In any case, since originalists maintain that a right to abortion can’t be inferred from the Constitution, the goals of an originalist and an opponent of legal abortion often dovetail conveniently. But, so far, Roe has survived the originalist era. Lately, some right-wing Republicans have, like Josh Hawley, been making it known that they don’t see much use for the originalists on the Court if they don’t deliver Roe a fatal blow. Rachel Bovard, a columnist for the Web site the Federalist, recently wrote, “If the outcome of Dobbs is indeed a hedge that splits the Court’s conservatives—or, to put it more bluntly, if the conservative legal movement has failed to produce Supreme Court Justices who are comfortable overturning two outrageously constitutionally defective rulings on abortion—we will be left to justifiably wonder what the whole project has been for.” Kelly Shackelford, the head of First Liberty Institute, an organization that advocates for religious freedom, said that, among his cohort, there was a sense that “if the originalists can’t get it right with these abortion cases, what’s the use of a conservative legal movement that follows originalism?” Shackelford thinks that it’s too early for this kind of impatience—and he’s optimistic about Barrett’s role on the Court—but he acknowledged that such talk “has been heavily focussed” on what she will do in the Mississippi case.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health probably wouldn’t have made it to the Court in its present form if Barrett hadn’t been there. When Mississippi first petitioned the Court, in June, 2020, it noted that “the questions presented in this petition do not require the Court to overturn Roe or Casey.” But, as Ruth Marcus pointed out in the Washington Post, “with the case accepted for review, Ginsburg dead and Barrett in her seat, Mississippi decided to go for broke.” The plaintiffs now asserted baldly that “overruling Roe and Casey makes resolution of this case straightforward,” and contended that “nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion.” Barrett may not yet be willing to provide what would most likely be the fifth vote—alongside Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch—to undo the Court’s abortion precedents. In the end, no matter what she decides, David Fontana, the George Washington University professor, told me, “she’s the center of the story—either she’s the woman who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, or she doesn’t, and then one round of stories is ‘Man, the conservatives can never win. They handpicked her for this and still couldn’t get it done.’ ”
If Barrett declines to overturn Roe in the Mississippi case, it could give momentum to conservative scholars and pundits who have already expressed disappointment in originalism. This faction would like to replace it with “common-good constitutionalism” or “common-good originalism”—approaches that make no apologies for elevating their versions of morality over others’. In a recent manifesto, the legal commentators Hadley Arkes, Garrett Snedeker, and Matthew Peterson, along with the opinion editor of Newsweek, Josh Hammer, argued for a “more robust jurisprudence rooted in the principles and practices of American constitutionalism before the last century of liberalism began its attempt to remake America.” Judges, they wrote, had to stand against a “moral relativism brooking no limits, not even those objective truths in nature that distinguish men from women.” For a time, originalists had held out against “the rapid hegemonic rise and the sweeping reach of ‘Progress’ ”—the manifesto praised District of Columbia v. Heller, in which Scalia interpreted the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual’s right to bear arms, and Citizens United, which equated unlimited corporate campaign spending with free speech. But originalists had relied too much on “proceduralist bromides”—asking Is it in the Constitution or not? instead of Is it right or wrong?—and thus had failed to achieve conservatives’ desired result of renewing the culture along traditionalist, or “natural law,” lines.
Given the classic conservative complaint about liberal “activist judges”—that they are nakedly results-oriented—this critique of originalism represents a volte-face. Common-good constitutionalism’s biggest thinker, the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule—who, in 2016, announced his conversion to Catholicism—regularly summons a vision of a new order that can sound more like an authoritarian theocracy than like a constitutional democracy. In 2020, he wrote a rather ominous essay in The Atlantic, “Beyond Originalism,” which argued:
Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.
That “possibly experienced at first as coercive” is a typical Vermeule flourish—an airy dismissal of fears that his preferred regime would be dystopian for citizens of a pluralistic society who share neither his moral viewpoint nor his orientation toward authority.
As a self-professed originalist, Barrett cannot be categorized as a disciple of this movement. Although Vermeule has expressed admiration for her, I couldn’t find a reciprocal tribute. Yet she is close enough to this school of thought to feel pressure from it. She has lectured at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a training program for Christian law students run by Alliance Defending Freedom, which regularly represents plaintiffs who claim that their religious liberties have been violated by antidiscrimination laws protecting L.G.B.T.Q. people. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a political scientist at Pomona College who has written two books on the conservative legal movement, told me that the views underpinning common-good constitutionalism are “quite prominent” at Blackstone, adding, “The tensions between natural-law originalists and libertarian originalists are already present in the Federalist Society, and Barrett sits at the crossroads of both of these factions.” Moreover, as a conservative Catholic, Barrett has been steeped in natural-law teachings—among them, that contraception and same-sex relations are unnatural and therefore immoral.
Ilya Shapiro, a former legal analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told me that he is skeptical of the “old conventional wisdom” that if the Court overturned Roe there would be “this apocalyptic huge popular reaction against it, and it would throw our political world into turmoil and affect the next elections.” Republican legislators and governors have already been sharply restricting abortion, without incurring political damage. In any case, Shapiro thinks that, to the extent that Barrett and other Trump-appointed Justices are worrying about political fallout, this is not the fallout they are worrying about. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, having been “reared in the modern conservative legal movement,” are likely more attuned to concerns that they will undermine that movement by upholding Roe. As Shapiro observed, they’re all associated with the Federalist Society—“they care about rigorous methods of interpretation that could get blown up . . . in a world where originalism is discredited and common-good constitutionalism is the most attractive mode of thinking.” (Last month, Shapiro apologized after tweeting, in reference to President Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to replace Breyer on the Court, that Biden should nominate the appellate-court judge Sri Srinivasan instead of a “lesser black woman.”)
At Barrett’s appellate-court confirmation hearing, in 2017, Senator Feinstein voiced an anxiety that Barrett’s religious beliefs might pose conflicts with her judicial role. It was a legitimate point, but Feinstein used an odd, unfortunate phrase—“The dogma lives loudly within you.” Conservatives framed the comment as élitist faith-bashing. It became a meme, and was printed on mugs and T-shirts. Many of Barrett’s admirers embraced the phrase, because to them it seemed thrillingly apposite.
Amy Coney was born in 1972 and grew up in Metairie, a mostly white, Republican-leaning suburb of New Orleans. Her father, Mike, was a lawyer for Shell Oil; her mother, Linda, was a high-school French teacher turned homemaker. They had seven children—six girls and a boy—and Amy was the oldest. The Coneys were Catholic but belonged to a group called People of Praise, a close-knit faith community with a charismatic flavor that would have been more familiar to born-again Christians than to most cradle Catholics. In 2018, Mike Coney wrote an essay for his church’s Web site explaining that People of Praise is a covenant community, meaning that members “promise to share life together and to look out for each other in all things material and spiritual.” In South Bend, some of Barrett’s children attended the Trinity School, which was established by members of People of Praise; for nearly three years, she sat on the board of Trinity, which also has campuses in Falls Church, Virginia, and in Eagan, Minnesota. (People of Praise was founded in 1971, and is influential in South Bend; nationwide, the group has only about fifteen hundred adult members.) When Barrett’s Court nomination was announced, some progressives went a little crazy about People of Praise, unfairly calling it a sexist cult. But the group does hold some traditional ideas about gender roles and sexuality. “Men and women separately meet weekly in small faith groups,” Mike Coney wrote in his essay. The group’s teachings stress the God-given complementarity of males and females. The Trinity School’s Web site states, “We understand marriage to be a legal and committed relationship between a man and a woman and believe that the only proper place for sexual activity is within these bounds of conjugal love.”
Barrett attended St. Mary’s Dominican High School, an all-girls school in New Orleans. She has described the single-sex atmosphere as “freeing,” noting, “I formed really close friendships. We could be very competitive with one another academically.” At Rhodes College, a liberal-arts school in Memphis that gave her a generous scholarship, she majored in English. In a 2019 appearance, she recalled doing so well in school that when she got “an A-minus in French” she was “pretty upset.” Rhodes has an honor code that is enforced entirely by students. Barrett served on the Honor Council, whose members have the power to suspend or expel their peers for cheating, lying, or stealing. In 1994, Barrett spoke to a campus magazine about the “heavy responsibility” that came with being a council member: “You have the power to affect someone’s life. You want to be absolutely sure you’re doing the right thing by that person.”
Jodi Grace, who served on the council with Barrett, and got to know her in a sorority where they both held leadership roles, recalls her as “very smart, very studious.” Grace, who is now a psychology professor at St. Thomas University, outside Miami, told me that although there was “nothing dominant or domineering” about Barrett, people “listened when she spoke,” in part because she took her campus duties so seriously: “The word that comes to mind is ‘proper.’ Something about her was always very appropriate—she was reserved, and I never saw any emotionally reactive moments.”
When Barrett decided to attend law school, Notre Dame was the obvious choice. “I’m a Catholic, and I always grew up loving Notre Dame,” she said in the 2019 appearance. “What Catholic doesn’t?” In “Separate but Faithful,” a book about the conservative Christian legal movement, Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Joshua C. Wilson write that Notre Dame is “arguably the nation’s elite conservative law school.” An unnamed Notre Dame faculty member told them, “It’s kind of like the Federalist Society distilled, in the sense of that’s the place you go for your judges, and this is where you go for your clerks.” Since the nineteen-eighties, the conservative Christian legal movement has been creating its own law schools—Ave Maria, in Florida; Regent, in Virginia—but none can claim the history or the prestige of Notre Dame. And though there are other well-regarded law schools where conservatives can find a critical mass of like-minded colleagues—the University of Chicago, for instance—those institutions are better known for law-and-economics or libertarian orientations than for religious ones.
Before the eighties, conservative Catholics and white evangelical Protestants seldom allied, or even mixed, but members of these faiths increasingly share political and social perspectives, and are especially aligned on such issues as abortion and gay rights. David Campbell, a political-science professor at Notre Dame who studies religion and politics, told me that this is one reason “Amy Coney Barrett received such full-throated support from evangelical Christians who, thirty or forty years ago, would not have considered her qualified—those distinctions have faded away.”
At Notre Dame, Campbell told me, “the law school is widely considered to be the most conservative college.” Barrett was the executive editor of the law review, got stellar grades, embraced originalism, and caught the notice of professors with connections to the Federalist Society and the Republican Party. She also met Jesse, who had grown up in South Bend and attended Notre Dame as an undergraduate, and was two years behind her at the law school. When she graduated, she clerked for Laurence Silberman, an appellate judge on the D.C. Circuit who’d been appointed by Reagan, and then for the biggest, baddest originalist of them all, Scalia. The Justice was known for provoking his clerks to argue back—he liked “going toe-to-toe,” as Barrett has recalled. The term she clerked for Scalia, 1998-99, was a quiet one. As Jay Wexler, who clerked for Ginsburg that year, put it to me, there was no especially fraught case that “made anybody want to push anybody into a fountain.” He added, “It was the kind of year where liberal and conservative clerks were friends.” Barrett was hardworking and well liked. Wexler, who is now a law professor at Boston University, nicknamed her the Conenator—because she was a powerhouse but also because it seemed funny, given her graciousness.
In 2017, all of Barrett’s fellow-clerks who were still alive—thirty-four people—signed a letter supporting Trump’s nomination of her to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, praising “her conscientious work ethic, her respect for the law, and her remarkable legal abilities.” (Some among this ideologically diverse group felt quite differently when Barrett was nominated to replace the liberal icon Ginsburg.) Nicole Garnett, who clerked for Justice Thomas, became a close friend of Barrett’s, and recalls that, among the female clerks, there were “four of us who hung out a lot—politically, we were not the same, but we were two Catholics, a Mormon, and an Orthodox Jew, all religious.”
In 1999, Barrett got married. After her Court clerkship, she worked for two years at a D.C. law firm, and then became a John M. Olin Fellow at the George Washington University. Olin Fellowships were a collaborative project between the Federalist Society and the Olin Foundation, and were designed to encourage more conservatives to enter the legal academy and to prepare them for success. Chip Lupu, a G.W. law professor who got to know her then, recalls that she was working on getting various articles accepted by journals, to make herself a more desirable hire. Barrett’s applications would have stood out to law faculties. David Fontana told me, “If you look at élite lawyers, and you set aside the libertarians, how many religious conservatives are there who graduate from top-twenty-five-ish law schools—who are former Supreme Court clerks, who are women? Very, very few.”
Notre Dame hired Barrett in 2002. She was thirty, and looked younger. She has recalled that she would wear her glasses to class, “to try and look very imposing.” She became a popular professor, winning the law school’s teaching prize three times. Barrett also published scholarship—most notably, several articles in which she explored the doctrines of precedent and of stare decisis from an originalist perspective. In a 2013 Texas Law Review article, she argued for the desirability of a “relaxed” approach to stare decisis. “I tend to agree,” she wrote, “with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it.” She noted that “a change in personnel may well shift the balance of views on the Court,” but that this need not render an “overruling illegitimate, as criticisms of overruling sometimes suggest.”
Barrett and Jesse both wanted a big family. According to Nicole Garnett, they’d talked about adoption even before getting married. The Barretts’ oldest child, Emma, who is now a junior at Notre Dame, was born in 2001, and followed by Tess, in 2004. That same year, the couple adopted Vivian. “We call them our very fraternal twins,” Barrett said, at a Notre Dame event in Washington, D.C. “We knew that we wanted to adopt internationally. The wait for domestic adoption was just very, very long. And there were so many children in need.” Vivian was tiny for her age, a result of being malnourished, and the Barretts were told that she might never speak. But Barrett likes to joke of the now teen-age Vivian, “Trust me, the speech hasn’t been a problem.” The Barretts had a third biological child, Liam, and decided they also wanted to take in a second child from Haiti, so that Vivian wouldn’t be the only Haitian adoptee in the family.
In 2007, they began the process of adopting a baby boy, John Peter, but the paperwork stalled. After the 2010 earthquake, the adoption agency called to say that the process could now be expedited, if the Barretts still wanted John Peter. They scarcely hesitated, though Barrett was pregnant again, with Juliet. Barrett tells a story about walking to a cemetery near the family’s big, Arts and Crafts-style house in South Bend, sitting down on a bench, and saying to herself, “If life’s really hard, at least it’s short.” Before she went home, she had concluded that “raising children and bringing John Peter home were the things of value—of the greatest value—that I could do right then, even more than teaching, or being a law professor.” The couple’s seventh child, Benjamin, was born with Down syndrome. Having a child with special needs, Barrett has said, is “probably the thing in my life that has helped me to grow the most and that has pushed me the most.” She has also described Benjamin, more than once, as “unreservedly” his siblings’ favorite.
The Barretts’ domestic obligations would be daunting for any couple, let alone two people pursuing demanding careers. “I have an awesome husband,” Barrett has said, emphasizing how essential it’s been for her to have a “complete, all-in partner.” She’s said that, at some point, Jesse “started doing most of the cooking and grocery shopping” and handling doctors’ appointments. South Bend, she has noted, is a small city with light traffic, which allowed her to get quickly to her children’s schools for parent-volunteer or car-pool duty. What’s more, Barrett once explained, “my husband’s aunt has watched our children since Emma was little—so for almost sixteen years we’ve had consistent child care in the home.” Barrett has recalled that the kids loved visiting their mother’s courtroom, where they climbed up on the bench; inspired by their father’s work as a federal prosecutor, they borrowed legal pads and started writing out “indictments for crimes that they’ve made up that the others have committed.”
Barrett may describe her life’s challenges with equanimity, but her friends sound amazed by her. They talk about how she would get up before 5 a.m. to go to the gym, then return to carry Benjamin downstairs on her back and join the family for breakfast; how she picked up her kids from soccer practice the day she flew back from meeting Trump at the White House; how she and Jesse had people over for dinner the night Kavanaugh’s nomination was announced—even though everyone knew she’d been in the running—and how, just before the announcement was made on TV, she turned to a guest to ask after her ailing mother. At an appearance at Hillsdale College, in 2019, Barrett recalled a moment when a close friend paid her a visit just after the birth of Benjamin, who was in the neonatal intensive-care unit. “Did you have to be so competitive?” the friend teased. “You already had the most interesting Christmas card on the mantel!” In 2018, at Barrett’s investiture ceremony for the Court of Appeals, Jesse gave a speech. “It is humbling to be married to Amy Barrett,” he said. “You can’t outwork Amy. I’ve also learned that you can’t outfriend Amy.” As admirable as it all sounds, you wonder how far Barrett’s empathetic imagination might extend to parents with messier lives, less energy, less support, and less good fortune.
Barrett took on more logistical challenges when she joined the Seventh Circuit. (The courthouse is in Chicago, about a hundred miles west of South Bend.) According to an analysis by Adam Feldman, of the blog Empirical SCOTUS, in Barrett’s three years on the appeals court she showed “a high rate of ruling for conservative outcomes in all types of decisions.” Her opinions were also largely “pro-business.” Barrett was involved with three abortion-related cases on the Seventh Circuit. In 2018, she was one of five judges who wanted to review a decision, made by a three-judge panel, that had struck down an Indiana law requiring fetal remains to be cremated or buried. In 2019, Barrett voted in favor of rehearing another overturned Indiana law—one requiring minors to get parental permission before an abortion. In the third case, also in 2019, she voted to permit a Chicago ordinance that kept anti-abortion protesters—or “sidewalk counsellors,” as they call themselves—at a distance from clinics. This may seem surprising, but the opinion she joined emphasized that the judges felt bound—and frustrated—by a 2000 Supreme Court decision upholding a similar Colorado law. As Courthouse News reported at the time, the ruling on the Chicago ordinance “almost begs the pro-life plaintiffs to appeal to the Supreme Court.”
Perhaps Barrett’s best-known appellate-court opinion was a dissent in a Second Amendment case, Kanter v. Barr. Rickey Kanter, a Wisconsin business owner, had committed Medicare fraud by, of all things, lying about therapeutic shoe inserts that his company sold. Because he was convicted of a felony, Kanter lost his right to own a gun; he appealed that decision. A Seventh Circuit panel that included Barrett and two Reagan appointees considered the case, and the two other judges concluded that Kanter could indeed be prevented from owning firearms. The judges in the majority applied a conventional balancing test, asking whether the government had a reasonable objective—in this case, preventing gun violence—and whether the statutes were “substantially related” to that interest. The judges answered yes to both questions, persuaded in part by the government’s presentation of evidence that even nonviolent felons were more likely than non-felons to commit a violent crime in the future.
Barrett dissented, saying that courts needed to look to “history and tradition” to determine whether nonviolent felons could be stripped of their gun rights. Doggedly working her way through dictionaries and public-safety statutes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she concluded that early American laws had not explicitly endorsed taking guns from felons, only from people deemed to be dangerous. Therefore—fast-forward to our world of AR-15s—it would be unconstitutional to deny Kanter his right to own a gun.
Adam Winkler, a Second Amendment expert at U.C.L.A.’s law school, told me that “if history and tradition alone” govern jurisprudence in gun cases then “a number of gun-control laws are likely to fall.” He added, “It’s hard to find a law with more widespread public support than preventing felons from possessing firearms. This kind of interpretation could be used to call into question virtually the entire gun-safety agenda: assault rifles, universal background checks. There’s no ‘history and tradition’ there.” Barrett’s logic could similarly overturn laws preventing people who were convicted of domestic violence from owning guns. Beating your wife wasn’t a crime in Colonial America, Winkler pointed out.
Winkler characterized the Kanter opinion as “Amy Coney Barrett’s audition tape for the Supreme Court”: “I’m not saying that’s how she conceptualized it, but it was a very expansive view of the Second Amendment—outside of the mainstream of most federal judges—and it goes out of its way to adopt a history-and-tradition analysis that would appeal to McConnell and to the Federalist Society.”
It seemed important to some of the people close to Barrett to emphasize that she is not ambitious. Nicole Garnett, who also became a law professor at Notre Dame, sent me an e-mail after we talked, saying she wanted readers to know that, as talented as Barrett is, “she never considered (or desired) being a judge, let alone a Justice.” Garnett continued, “She carefully considered opportunities as they arose, but never angled for them. She and Jesse were content here in South Bend, she loved her job and her life . . . and, in fact, this was a sacrifice for them both. Ambition played no role in her nomination or acceptance of it. She’s not a political actor.” Barrett’s friend Aimee Buccellato, who runs an architecture firm in South Bend, sounded a similar note when she talked about the “sacrifice” that Amy and Jesse had made in uprooting their family. The Barretts, who moved to the D.C. area in 2021, had prayed on the decision. Buccellato told me, “They have that grounding in faith where—I want to put this carefully—they felt capable of making big decisions, because they know it’s not a decision that they make on their own.”
On one level, this characterization of Barrett seems genuine. She clearly had a full and busy life in South Bend, and planning to be named a Supreme Court Justice would be like planning to win the lottery. She has spoken to law students about the value of prayer when contemplating career decisions or following a calling. But downplaying her ambition—and, let’s face it, she’s gotten pretty far in life—also feeds a certain wishful narrative. It makes Barrett sound pure enough to withstand the swampy atmosphere of Washington and the careerist temptations of élite approval. Soon after she was nominated, the Heritage Foundation held an online event in which a panel of speakers discussed Barrett. One of the speakers, John Baker, a Louisiana State University law professor emeritus, had known her for many years. The moderator asked if Barrett would become another centrist disappointment, like Souter or Kennedy or Roberts. Baker replied that it was a matter of character. What it comes down to, he said of the Justices, is: “Are they willing to be vilified?” Alito was. Thomas was. Scalia had been. “Others, when they get vilified, tend to go squishy,” Baker said. “You’ve got to put people up there for whom their ambition has not been to get on the Supreme Court. And I can tell you that has not been Judge Barrett’s ambition. It probably never occurred to her, until a couple of years ago.” She was unlikely to go squishy.
When Barrett joined the Court, it was apparent that, even with five conservatives already on the bench, she would be pivotal, sometimes casting the deciding vote in 5–4 decisions and sometimes consolidating a new six-person super-bloc. Her appointment redefined the Court as a consistently conservative body. Indeed, in her first term she joined the five other conservatives in making it more difficult for members of minority groups in Arizona to vote, and in overturning a California requirement that restricted dark-money charitable donations.
She offered a few surprises. At her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, she had been asked if she posed a threat to Obamacare—in 2017, she had published a book review in which she briefly but sharply criticized Roberts’s reasoning for saving it, writing that his interpretation of the Affordable Care Act had gone beyond the statute’s “plausible meaning.” But upon becoming a Justice she helped the A.C.A. survive another challenge, signing on to what the Times called “Breyer’s modest and technical majority opinion” upholding it. And in October she joined Kavanaugh and Breyer in declining a request to block Maine’s vaccine mandate for health-care workers who objected on religious grounds.
In general, though, Barrett has been consistent in siding with plaintiffs who argued that pandemic restrictions had unfairly constricted the free exercise of their faith. Soon after her confirmation, she joined Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh in supporting the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn’s challenge to limits set by New York State on the number of religious congregants who could gather for services. On January 13th, she voted with the conservative bloc to reject the Biden Administration’s mandate for large employers to require their workers to be vaccinated or to be tested regularly. And although a majority of the Justices allowed the Administration to proceed with a narrower mandate, one applying only to employees at health-care facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid, Barrett signed on to dissents by Thomas and Alito.
On the day of oral argument in the vaccine-mandate case—with Omicron still surging in D.C.—the Court offered a striking tableau of division. The eight Justices who showed up in person wore masks, except for the intransigent Gorsuch. Sotomayor, who normally sits next to him, and who has diabetes, participated by audio feed from her chambers. The liberals sounded deeply frustrated. “This is a pandemic in which nearly a million people have died,” Kagan said. “It is by far the greatest public danger that this country has faced in the last century. . . . And this is the policy that is most geared to stopping all this.”
In a Second Amendment case that the Court heard this past fall, which challenges a New York law requiring people to provide a particular reason for needing to carry a concealed handgun in public, Barrett has, as in the Mississippi abortion case, already exerted influence just by her presence. Adam Winkler, of U.C.L.A., said, “The Court has had concealed-carry cases presented to it for more than ten years, and had shied away from virtually all of them until Barrett was confirmed.” It takes only four Justices’ votes to accept a case, a procedure known as granting certiorari, or cert. Presumably, once Kavanaugh joined the Court there would have been enough, but, Winkler noted, “it seems likely that Barrett’s vote mattered not so much to obtain the four votes for cert but to convince Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh that they had a five-Justice majority” for the ultimate ruling. And Barrett, given her dissent as an appellate judge in Kanter, “is likely to be a very strong conservative vote against gun control.”
In oral arguments, Barrett has been an outspoken participant, interrupting counsel when she wants a question answered more clearly or quickly, but she is neither a showboat nor a wit. Her friend and Notre Dame Law School colleague Richard Garnett said, “She’s not playing for laughs or engaging in rhetoric for show. She’s careful, disciplined, focussed.” A former legal colleague of Barrett’s who didn’t want to be named, because he sometimes argues before the Court, said of her, “She knows the cases at a high level of detail. She doesn’t ask nonsense questions or play games. And she wants to hear your answer. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there is an answer that could take her initial intuition and turn it around. But she does really want to know that she has heard the best version of what you think.”
Barrett authored just four majority opinions in her first term, in cases that didn’t attract much attention. Her writing is not flashy. The former colleague said, “People like to talk about how the prose of Gorsuch or Kagan sparkles. I don’t think she is aiming for sparkle. She values organizational and explanatory clarity.”
In a religion case in which Barrett wrote a concurrence, it was possible to infer that she is inclined to move more slowly and gingerly than some of her conservative colleagues. But you could also see how much more receptive the Court has become to religious claims, and how Barrett solidifies that shift. The Justices were weighing whether the City of Philadelphia could deny contracts to a Catholic social-services agency that would not place foster children with same-sex couples. In a narrow, unanimous decision, the Court said that, for technical reasons, Philadelphia could not refuse to work with the Catholic agency—thus dodging the bigger question of what to do when gay rights and religious rights clash. Alito was incensed by this caution. He’d seen the case as an opportunity for the Court to toss out a 1990 ruling that he and many conservatives loathe, Employment Division v. Smith, which had held that a neutral, generally applicable law doesn’t violate the free exercise of religion. In a blistering seventy-seven-page concurrence in the Philadelphia case, Alito complained that the Court had “emitted a wisp of a decision that leaves religious liberty in a confused and vulnerable state.”
Barrett wrote a short, cogent concurrence in which she said that although she also found Smith problematic, she wasn’t ready to discard it. She listed questions that would need to be answered first, and said that she was “skeptical about swapping Smith’s categorical antidiscrimination approach for an equally categorical strict scrutiny regime, particularly when this Court’s resolution of conflicts between generally applicable laws and other First Amendment rights—like speech and assembly—has been much more nuanced.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page, among other conservative commentators, was dismayed by Barrett’s own nuances. But Kelly Shackelford, of First Liberty, told me that Barrett had set the stage for a future case that could take Smith down. “It’s good those questions she asked are laid out,” he said, so that they can be duly “addressed in scholarship and in other legal arguments.”
Some people I spoke with wondered if Barrett had staked out a position different from Alito’s because the Smith opinion had been written by her mentor Scalia. Smith belonged to an earlier era of religious-freedom jurisprudence, in which cases were frequently brought on behalf of religious minorities. Smith had centered on two Oregon men who had been fired from their jobs for using peyote, an illegal substance, in Native American religious rituals. The Justices had held that the state hadn’t discriminated against them on religious grounds when it denied them unemployment benefits, because a state law forbidding the use of peyote applied to every resident equally.
Nelson Tebbe, a constitutional-law professor at Cornell, told me that most religious-freedom litigation is now “being brought by the largest religious groups, including Protestant evangelicals and Catholics.” Tebbe explained that these litigants would likely say that such lawsuits have become necessary “because the government has become more progressive, and more willing to regulate long-cherished beliefs and practices.” Various Christian groups have framed the recognition of same-sex marriage, civil-rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people, and the guarantees of contraception coverage under the A.C.A. as violations of other Americans’ right to exercise their religion.
It’s an argument that assertively expands the scope of the free-exercise clause to cover not just worship, proselytizing, and religious education but, increasingly, activities in the public square that impinge directly on other people—such as refusing to get vaccinated or to provide wedding goods for a same-sex couple. Robert Tuttle, a law professor at the George Washington University who writes extensively about the religion clauses, described this phenomenon as trying to “insure that the faithful can exempt themselves from norms that legal or majoritarian processes have changed.” He went on, “The battle is to get control of institutions, reverse these norms, and reinstate a moral order compatible with their faith.”
Lee Epstein and Eric Posner, in their article on the Supreme Court’s religion jurisprudence, found that rulings in favor of religion have increased from about forty-six per cent under Chief Justice Earl Warren (whose tenure ran from 1953 to 1969) to eighty-three per cent today, with the biggest leap occurring under Roberts. “The Warren Court religion cases were notable for protecting minority or non-mainstream religions,” Epstein and Posner write, because at the time mainstream Christian groups weren’t claiming a beleaguered status. When non-mainstream plaintiffs have come before the Roberts Court, they have also fared well, lending some credence to what Alito and other conservatives insist—that they care about religious liberty writ large, not just for Christians. The sole exception that Epstein and Posner found, however, is a telling one: when Hawaii challenged Trump’s 2017 travel ban under the establishment clause of the First Amendment, saying that it discriminated against Muslims, the Supreme Court upheld the ban.
In December, the Court heard another important church-state case. The State of Maine pays private-school tuition for families living in rural areas that lack a public secondary school, but historically it has excluded religious schools from the arrangement. Three couples sued Maine, saying that their First Amendment rights had been violated by the state’s refusal to subsidize their children’s education at religious schools. Most scholars and journalists following the case think that the Justices will rule for the families, with implications for other cases centered on church-state separation. Micah Schwartzman, the U.Va. professor, said, “This case is going to tell us a lot about how far the Court will go in allowing the funding of private religious schools. This Court, more than any in American history, is prepared to give religion privileged treatment—to prefer it over nonreligious views.”
During the oral argument, Barrett questioned the lawyer arguing for the State of Maine about why children attending religious schools could not receive tuition from the state, too. “All schools, in making choices about curriculum and the formation of children, have to come from some belief system,” she said. With public schools, school boards made decisions about “the kind of values that they want to inculcate in the students.” She continued, “I mean, how would you even know if a school taught ‘All religions are bigoted and biased,’ or, you know, ‘Catholics are bigoted,’ or, you know, ‘We take a position on the Jewish-Palestinian conflict because of our position on, you know, Jews’?”
This was an eyebrow-raising question—and not only because Barrett seemed to be conflating “Jewish” and “Israeli.” Tebbe said, “She was articulating a certain conception of neutrality. Opponents of the idea of church-and-state separation have often said that eliminating religion from public schools is not neutral—it’s imposing a religion of secularism. In previous eras, though, the Court was quite clear that, no, that’s not the case—it’s just enforcing a separation between church and state.” Barrett’s idea, which the Court seemed ready to embrace, was that education was inevitably a value-based enterprise, and that religion was just one perspective among many.
Though conservative Justices now dominate the Court, it is striking how firmly they hold to the notion of themselves as persecuted figures in a hostile America. Alito, one of the most powerful people in the country, seems chronically put out. In 2020, after a long string of Court victories for religious-freedom lawsuits, he gave a speech to the Federalist Society in which he warned that “in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” He also asserted that “the right to keep and bear arms” was “the ultimate second-tier constitutional right.” The America of 2022 is quite plainly not a country where citizens’ ability to worship freely is in jeopardy. Nor is the nation on the cusp of cancelling gun rights. Yet the conservative Justices often act as if they were alone in a broken elevator, jabbing the emergency button and hollering for help.
The reality is that Americans face a future in which the Court, much like the rest of the country’s political infrastructure, will be imposing an array of conservative, minority views, some of them religiously based. A majority of Americans want to keep abortion legal, but the Justices may well overturn Roe anyway. Some states will act to preserve abortion rights, and Americans with resources will travel to those states or procure abortion pills online; revoking the legal right won’t stop people from terminating pregnancies. The burden will fall disproportionately on poor women and women of color. In the coming months and years, the Justices will be weighing cases on affirmative action, gun rights, voting restrictions, immigration, environmental regulation, and the separation of church and state. Their rulings on many of these issues won’t be that hard to guess, however often they insist that they are guided merely by their close and unpredictable readings of foundational texts.
In September, less than two weeks after the Court declined to block a draconian anti-abortion law in Texas that employed a constitutionally suspect mode of citizen enforcement, Barrett gave a speech at a private event in Louisville, Kentucky. “My goal today is to convince you that this Court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she reportedly said. “The media, along with hot takes on Twitter, report the results and the decisions. That makes the decisions seem results-oriented.” Other Justices appear similarly concerned about preserving the Court’s institutional legitimacy. Public-approval ratings of the Supreme Court are at an all-time low, and there’s been serious talk in Washington of reforming it by expanding its numbers or limiting Justices’ terms. Not long before Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, he published a book in which he assures readers that he and his colleagues “studiously” set aside ideology when deciding a case. Perhaps, though, these avowals are partly why Americans trust the Court less; they can feel an awful lot like gaslighting.
David Fontana, the George Washington University professor, said that the coming battles over Breyer’s successor may further erode the Court’s image as a bastion: “It will mean that there will be very political confirmation hearings around the time the Court is considering and then issuing controversial decisions on issues like whether to overrule Roe. The aesthetics will be ugly.”
Unsurprisingly, Barrett’s Louisville speech was not a stem-winder, like Alito’s. But the difference was more than a matter of tone. Whereas Alito’s eruption of anger seemed forthright, Barrett’s pious insistence that she had no agenda did not. Indeed, the forum she had chosen for her speech was hardly neutral. She had gone to Kentucky to help celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the McConnell Center—a leadership-training center, at the University of Louisville, named for Mitch McConnell, who had helped secure her confirmation in time to rally Republican voters before the 2020 election. McConnell had been brazenly hypocritical in his fealty to Trump and the Republican Party: he had blocked Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Court for eight months before the 2016 Presidential election, saying that voters should be allowed to decide who the next Justice would be. In Louisville, McConnell praised Barrett as a product of “Middle America” who didn’t try to “legislate from the bench.” The Justices aren’t partisan hacks, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t political. Barrett may be pursuing her goals more slowly, and more cautiously, than Alito. But what’s the hurry? She has plenty of time.
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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Supreme Court Conservatives Signal Support for Measures to Disenfranchise Black Voters
Greg Stohr, Bloomberg
Excerpt: "A divided U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to minority voting rights, reinstating an Alabama congressional map that creates only one district likely to elect a Black representative after a lower court had said federal law required a second one."
A divided U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to minority voting rights, reinstating an Alabama congressional map that creates only one district likely to elect a Black representative after a lower court had said federal law required a second one.
The 5-4 order ensures that Alabama voters will use the original Republican-drawn map in the November election. The state, which has seven congressional districts, is 27% Black.
Two justices in the majority -- Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito -- said the order wasn’t a decision on the merits of the Voting Rights Act case and will apply only until the justices can rule on Alabama’s appeal. Kavanaugh said the Supreme Court “has repeatedly stated that federal courts ordinarily should not enjoin a state’s election laws in the period close to an election.”
The court’s three liberals blasted that reasoning. “Alabama is not entitled to keep violating Black Alabamians’ voting rights just because the court’s order came down in the first month of an election year,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for court’s three liberals. Chief Justice John Roberts also dissented but didn’t join Kagan’s opinion.
The court didn’t say when it will hear the case, though under its normal scheduling practices, arguments will take place during the nine-month term that starts in October.
The dispute is the first Supreme Court test for the new districts being drawn around the country to govern the next decade’s elections. The case could affect Texas, where the Biden administration is challenging the state’s voting maps, and potentially other states whose district lines are under scrutiny from civil rights groups.
A three-judge panel said last month that Alabama’s map violated the Voting Rights Act by including only one district where Black voters would have the opportunity to elect the representative of their choice. The panel said Alabama’s Black population “is sufficiently geographically compact to constitute a voting-age majority in a second reasonably configured district.”
‘Shadow Docket’
Alabama sought emergency Supreme Court intervention and asked the justices to hear arguments. The state said that lawmakers didn’t consider race in drawing the map and that the panel’s ruling would force the state to prioritize race over traditional redistricting principles.
A new map would mean “sorting and splitting voters across the state on the basis of race alone,” argued the state’s attorney general, Steve Marshall.
Roberts said he agreed with the court’s decision to hear arguments but would have left the lower court ruling in place for the November election.
Kagan faulted the majority for using the so-called “shadow docket” to usher in a major legal shift.
“Today’s decision is one more in a disconcertingly long line of cases in which this court uses its shadow docket to signal or make changes in the law, without anything approaching full briefing and argument,” Kagan wrote, in an opinion joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
Kavanaugh said Kagan was using “catchy but worn-out rhetoric.”
“The stay will allow this court to decide the merits in an orderly fashion -- after full briefing, oral argument, and our usual extensive internal deliberations -- and ensure that we do not have to decide the merits on the emergency docket,” Kavanaugh wrote. “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits.”
The other justices in the majority -- Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett -- gave no explanation for their votes.
NAACP Lawsuit
The lower-court panel gave the Alabama legislature 14 days -- until Feb. 7 -- to produce a new map and said it would appoint an expert to draw the lines if lawmakers failed to do so. The panel included two appointees of former President Donald Trump and one judge named by former President Bill Clinton.
Alabama said its districts have remained largely the same since 1992, when a court-ordered map allowed the election of the state’s first Black representative in more than 90 years. Alabama has had a single Black representative ever since.
The new state-drawn map was challenged in four lawsuits, two of which made their way to the Supreme Court. A group that includes the Alabama chapter of the NAACP told the justices the plaintiffs offered alternative maps with districts that even the state’s expert witness acknowledged were more compact than those in the original map.
“Plaintiffs presented eleven illustrative maps showing that it is possible, consistent with the state’s redistricting criteria, to draw two majority-Black congressional districts,” the group argued.
The case involves the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, which outlaws election rules that discriminate on the basis of race. The Supreme Court has said in the past the law bars states from drawing voting lines in a way that dilutes the power of racial minorities.
The conservative-majority Supreme Court narrowed Section 2 in a different context last year when the justices upheld two Arizona voting restrictions that opponents said disproportionately affected racial minorities. That ruling didn’t directly apply to redistricting.
The cases are Merrill v. Milligan, 21A375, and Merrill v. Caster, 21A376.
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J. Michelle Childs. (photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)
Progressives Criticize J. Michelle Childs, a Potential Biden Supreme Court Pick
Christopher Wilson, Yahoo! News
Wilson writes: "President Biden's potential nomination of Judge J. Michelle Childs to the Supreme Court is giving him another opportunity to either try for a bipartisan victory or heed the wishes of the left of his party."
President Biden’s potential nomination of Judge J. Michelle Childs to the Supreme Court is giving him another opportunity to either try for a bipartisan victory or heed the wishes of the left of his party.
Childs was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina by Barack Obama in 2009. The 55-year-old jurist is a favorite of Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., who pushed Biden to make the pledge to select a Black woman and whose endorsement helped the president salvage his Democratic primary campaign. Across the aisle, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has also praised Childs.
"I can't think of a better person for President Biden to consider for the Supreme Court than Michelle Childs," Graham said on CBS last month. "She has wide support in our state. She is considered to be a fair-minded, highly gifted jurist. She's one of the most decent people I've ever met."
Graham and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., have both hinted that Childs could earn their vote, which would ensure an easy confirmation. Democrats have 50 votes in the Senate, meaning there is a thin margin for error in confirming Biden’s pick.
As a candidate for president, Biden touted his ability to work with Republicans, campaigning on his ability to unify the country. In recent weeks, his White House has been celebrating a bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed during the summer even as his larger domestic agenda remains stalled in Congress.
But although the South Carolina delegation has praised her, Childs’s résumé has drawn scrutiny from many on the left, with a particular focus on her time at a corporate law firm defending management in cases involving discrimination and labor law violations.
Our Revolution, a progressive group that sprung from Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, has been critical of Childs, while two Democratic congressmen are circulating a letter stating that “for far too long, the Supreme Court has been dominated by pro-corporate justices” and that “labor-minded jurists bring crucial knowledge and experience to the bench.”
Perhaps most important for Biden, who has billed himself as “the most pro-union president,” Childs has been sharply criticized by some labor leaders.
“There’s a long list to choose from,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, told the Washington Post last week. “That’s why it’s great that President Biden can pass on a management-side lawyer like Childs, who has argued disdainfully against workers’ rights in favor of several other candidates who have been in the trenches with workers and have a proven record of upholding worker rights.”
Childs’s supporters have pointed to her work with the South Carolina Workers' Compensation Commission and her public school education. She attended the University of South Florida for her undergraduate degree and the University of South Carolina for law school. If nominated and confirmed, she would be one of only two current justices who didn’t attend Harvard or Yale.
Childs picked up an unlikely ally over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board. In an op-ed published Friday evening titled “Vetoing a Black Woman Judge,” the paper’s board wrote: “A funny thing is happening on the way to President Biden’s first Supreme Court nomination. The opposition to one of the mooted black woman favorites is coming from the left, not the right.”
“Whatever happened to diversity, as progressives try to disqualify Judge J. Michelle Childs?” it added, although none of the appeals from the left for a non-Childs option have called on Biden to break his promise to appoint a Black woman for the role.
The decision will give Biden an opportunity to either try for a potentially easier Supreme Court confirmation or to attempt to firm up his position with the left of the party. While the White House can pin the blame for Democrats’ legislative failures on centrist Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., progressives have been frustrated by the White House on a number of issues where the executive branch has more control.
Liberals have complained about a lack of movement on student loan debt forgiveness and reforming marijuana policy, while immigration advocates have decried the continuation of a Trump-era border policy. Last year, the White House initially tried to keep a record-low cap on refugees in place until an outcry from across the Democratic caucus led to a reversal. Biden has seen his approval rating steadily decline among Democrats, slipping from 92 percent last summer to 76 percent in a recent Pew Research survey.
Many progressives have put their support behind Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former public defender who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and was considered an early favorite for the nomination when news of Breyer’s retirement broke. When Jackson was confirmed to her current position last year, she received support from every Democratic senator and three Republicans: Graham, as well as Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
On Sunday, Murkowski indicated that she could vote for Biden’s Supreme Court pick. “I would be honored to be able to support an exceptional African-American woman,” the Republican moderate told CNN.
Biden has said he hopes to announce his nomination by the end of February.
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A Gulf fritillary butterfly perches on a flower at the National Butterfly Center, which is home to several endangered plants and threatened animals. (photo: Claire Harbage/NPR)
How a Butterfly Refuge at the Texas Border Became the Target of Far-Right Lies
J. David Goodman, The New York Times
Goodman writes: "For nearly two decades, the National Butterfly Center has provided a place of wonder along the banks of the Rio Grande, attracting curious visitors and nature enthusiasts from around the country to watch delicate creatures like the xami hairstreak float over flowers and alight on logs."
For nearly two decades, the National Butterfly Center has provided a place of wonder along the banks of the Rio Grande, attracting curious visitors and nature enthusiasts from around the country to watch delicate creatures like the xami hairstreak float over flowers and alight on logs.
Among those who trade in outlandish right-wing conspiracies online, though, the center is said to be something else: a cover for human smuggling, sex trafficking and the exploitation of children. The lies have spread so widely in recent years that the center is now receiving visitors with no interest in butterflies at all.
Last month, a Republican congressional candidate from Virginia came to the center looking for a site of human smugglers and had a physical altercation with its director. Days later, a man from an upstart media organization associated with Steve Bannon recorded a video outside the center’s gates, claiming “credible threats of the cartels trafficking children through the butterfly center.” To make his point, he held up a tiny shoe.
This past Wednesday, as butterflies fluttered across winter-browned grasses, frenzied staff members packed files, fielded messages from saddened supporters and hung a sign on the gate: “Closed until further notice.” Nearby, a newly installed police guard tower flashed red and blue.
In a country where many believe that Satan-worshipping pedophiles run the government and the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. will restore a Trump presidency, the center has become the latest victim of wild misinformation and outright lies spreading rapidly online. It has become a borderland version of Comet Ping Pong, the Washington pizzeria that became the center of the baseless Pizzagate theory, which claimed that Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring in the restaurant. That lie spread so far that it prompted a North Carolina man to drive to the pizzeria and fire an assault rifle inside.
Becoming the focus of this type of attention has terrified and infuriated the staff at the butterfly center, some of whom have taken steps to protect themselves online and at work.
“The kind of activity, the kind of chatter going on — these are the kinds of things that happen before other horrible events where people ended up dying,” said Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg, president of the nonprofit North American Butterfly Association, which runs the butterfly center in Mission.
He feared that someone who believed the lies could resort to violence, and cited the mass killer who targeted Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, amid a similarly heated debate over border security.
“We know it’s a dangerous lie,” said Glassberg, 74, a lifelong lover of butterflies who also developed the process of DNA fingerprinting. “People say you’re raping babies, then unhinged people come out of the woodwork.”
When people began showing up at the butterfly center, it decided it needed to do more to provide security for staff members and visitors. It would remain closed, he said, until a plan could be developed for how to do so.
Created nearly two decades ago by Glassberg, the butterfly center in Mission was built on the site of a former onion field. The recent trouble began in 2017 as then-President Donald Trump pushed to build new sections of border wall. The center did not support construction of the wall through its 100-acre property.
The center and its staff have endured attacks by conservative figures and from Bannon’s “We Build the Wall,” a crowdfunding campaign that raised millions to construct a border barrier on private land near the butterfly center. Bannon and Brian Kolfage, an Iraq War veteran involved in leading the effort, were indicted by federal prosecutors in 2020 on fraud charges. (Bannon was pardoned by Trump.)
During the wall-funding campaign, Kolfage repeatedly attacked the butterfly center on social media. “Instead of enabling women and children to be sex trafficked like @NatButterflies, we are taking action! This is a war for control of the most powerful country,” read one post from his Twitter account in 2019.
“When I took this job, I thought I would be able to spend a good amount of time outdoors: butterflies, birds, educating children, writing grants,” said Marianna Trevino Wright, the center’s executive director since 2012. “Now every day my children literally worry whether I’m going to survive a day at work.”
Before the closure Wednesday, staffers grabbed files and discussed how to continue their work at home. A groundskeeper volunteered to care for the center’s red snake, carrying it out in a large glass tank along with two frozen rats for food.
Wright fielded calls from reporters around the country and took care of last-minute paperwork, a pistol in a leather holster on her right hip. Bumper stickers and signs opposing the border wall sat in a pile on a meeting table alongside a glass of red wine.
“The board is going to hate this sidearm,” said Wright, 52, a South Texas native whose father immigrated from Mexico as a young physician. But, she added, the people attacking the center “need to know they’re not the only ones who carry weapons.”
Wright said she began carrying a pistol at work after her altercation in the center’s colorful reception area with Kimberly Lowe, the candidate for Congress in Virginia.
Lowe and another woman arrived at the center last month, hoping to walk to the Rio Grande. Wright, after looking at Lowe’s Facebook posts, barred them from the property and then swatted away Lowe’s phone when she started filming. After that, Wright said, she was “thrown to the ground,” her own phone was taken by the other woman, and Lowe nearly ran over Wright’s son with her car.
Lowe denied any wrongdoing and accused Wright of being the aggressor. “Because of Marianna’s lies, I’ve lost valuable time on the campaign trail and have constant harassment and death threats,” she said in a statement. A spokesperson for the Mission Police Department said the altercation was still under investigation.
Days later, a border security gathering attracted conservative activists to nearby McAllen with speakers like Michael Flynn, the former general and national security adviser to Trump, and musician Ted Nugent. On Jan. 30, roughly 100 marched to a section of wall near the center, some armed with long guns, others singing “Amazing Grace.”
After that, the nonprofit board voted to close the butterfly center, while continuing to pay its staff.
The nonprofit has been engaged in a yearslong legal battle with the federal government over Border Patrol activity and against Bannon’s group, accusing the latter of defamation. As the cases drag on, construction of the border wall has crept closer to the center’s property, which features wild patches and native plants cultivated to attract butterflies.
The beeping of construction vehicles could be heard from inside the refuge as cranes and earth movers worked on the levee near two sections of wall, each less than a half-mile away.
National Guard troops, deployed to the border by Gov. Greg Abbott last year, have taken up a position on a levee, more than 1 mile from the border but just outside a back gate of the center. The troops stand by a camouflage Humvee, assault rifles strapped across their chests, watching for anyone who might appear to be a migrant who crossed illegally.
Walking over the levee on a recent afternoon, Wright warned the troops of a different kind of arrival from Mexico: She had seen fresh bear tracks zigzagging on a muddy road. Mexican black bears have been spotted on the property before, she said, arriving there from across the river.
The Guard has been a recent addition to an area already crowded with law enforcement. A short walk from the butterfly center is a Border Patrol facility. Nearby, a surveillance tower with sensors and cameras rises over the trees.
In January, two members of the Guard crashed a truck into a steel Border Patrol gate on the butterfly center’s land. Staff members at the center said they found a can of Bud Light tossed into the grass nearby. A Guard spokesperson said there was “zero indication” that alcohol was involved.
The center has in some ways embraced its unlikely role in the heated political debate over the border. “Proud left wing ‘thug’ with a ‘sham’ butterfly agenda,” reads a mug on sale at in the gift shop, drawing quotes from Kolfage’s Twitter account.
But most visitors come for nature, not politics. In the hours before the center closed Wednesday, a handful of people roamed through the dormant formal gardens.
“I moved here from Galveston because of the butterfly center,” said Christine Balboni, 63, a retired Coast Guard captain. “I’ve butterflied in other places, but this is where you go to get some incredible tropical butterflies that you won’t see anywhere else.”
She and her friend Lorna Graham walked slowly under a warm winter sun, carrying binoculars and multiple cameras.
“What started me on butterflies is this place,” said Graham, who splits her time between Ontario, Canada, and an RV park in Mission. Both women lamented the state of politics that precipitated the indefinite closure.
“It’s just incredibly sad,” Balboni said.
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Students wear masks to protect against Covid-19 in a classroom. (photo: JHU)
School Mask Mandates Are Falling in States Across the Northeast
Laura Meckler and Paulina Firozi, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The Democratic governors of New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware will lift mask requirements for schools in the coming weeks."
Democratic governors in Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and others plan to lift statewide rules
The Democratic governors of New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware will lift mask requirements for schools in the coming weeks, reflecting a nationwide shift away from restrictions as coronavirus caseload numbers fall and political pressures for a return to normalcy rise.
Teachers, school boards and administrators have been fighting fiercely over mask policies all school year. Most recently, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) banned districts from requiring masks in schools on his first day in office last month, prompting several lawsuits to allow districts to keep them in place.
In one camp are those who argue that masks are essential to slow transmission of the virus and keep schools open for in-person learning. In another are those who say the pandemic has eased enough to allow local officials to set polices — or even for parents to decide what’s best for their children. Now the second argument is gaining steam, as states and communities across the country move away from mandatory policies.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced Monday that the state’s mask mandate for schools and child-care facilities will end on March 7, throwing the decision to local districts. Delaware Gov. John Carney (D) said mask requirements in K-12 public and private schools, as well as child-care facilities, would expire at the end of March. And Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, another Democrat, said he was recommending that the statewide mask mandate in schools and elsewhere expire at the end of February, which would require lawmakers to extend executive powers by about two weeks.
“Each and every mayor, each and every superintendent can make that call themselves,” Lamont said.
In recent weeks, statewide school mask requirements also have been lifted in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Massachusetts now allows districts where 80 percent of students and staff are vaccinated to forgo face coverings. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is considering whether to modify a statewide school mask mandate. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Friday: “It’s something we get asked a lot about: When are masks coming off in schools? We’ll be making some announcements in the short term as we see these numbers progressing.”
Rules remain in more than a half-dozen states, including Washington, Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico, but more officials are signaling that an end is near.
Once the new rules are in effect, school districts will be able to decide for themselves whether to require masks. Tracking of district policies from Burbio, a data firm, shows a rise in the share not requiring masks in schools, from about 25 percent in early October to 35 percent this week.
Asked if the Newark schools would continue to require masks, a spokeswoman suggested they would. “The mask is a part of the district’s protocols,” she said. Paul Brubaker, spokesman for Paterson, N.J., schools, said the superintendent plans to consult with teachers, staff and parents before deciding what to do. Elizabeth Public Schools plans to stop requiring masks on March 7, district spokesman Pat Politano said in a statement.
The change in statewide policy, Murphy said Monday, is possible “given the continuing drop in new cases and hospitalizations from omicron, and with all the evidence projecting a continued decline over the coming weeks.”
Carney offered much the same reasoning in Delaware. “We’re in a much better place than we were several weeks ago in the middle of the Omicron surge of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations,” he said in a statement Monday. He also noted the end of an indoor mask mandate in the state, beginning Friday morning.
The policies are shifting as the nation approaches the two-year anniversary of the wholesale shutdown of American education, which unfolded with stunning speed. In early March 2020, school buildings closed for what officials believed would be a short-term pause. It took some more than a year to reopen.
When students first began returning to classrooms, masks were required in virtually all schools. But soon after, policies divided along partisan lines, with many Democratic governors directing all districts to require masks, and many Republican governors barring their districts from doing so. Many states have long left it up to individual districts to decide.
What’s striking now is the shift among Democratic governors toward allowing school districts to decide for themselves whether to require masks in their classrooms.
“We have to learn how to live with covid,” Murphy said Monday from New Jersey.
Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governors Association, said at a briefing last week following a winter meeting of the group that “the general consensus is we’re on the road from a pandemic to an endemic.” He added, “No one knows how straight the road is or how long it will take us,” pointing to “overwhelming sentiment on both sides of the aisle” for a return to normal.
Brian Stryker, a Democratic consultant who has warned his party about its vulnerability on education issues this year, said Monday that the governors’ actions are politically helpful because they put control over policy with districts, closer to parents. Most important, he said, is that schools remain open.
Democrats, he said, “need to show voters that we are heading back to normal. Reducing of statewide mask mandates is a big part of that.”
In the United States overall, new daily reported coronavirus cases have fallen 42 percent in the past week, according to data tracked by The Washington Post, while covid-related hospitalizations have dropped 16 percent. Covid-related deaths are still ticking up — there was a 4 percent increase nationwide in average daily deaths in the past week.
Teachers unions, which have pushed for more protections in schools, reacted cautiously to Monday’s spate of announcements, concerned that mask requirements will be lifted for political reasons.
The New Jersey Education Association, which represents more than 167,000 teachers and school staff, said in a statement that it hopes cases continue to fall, allowing districts to lift their mandates safely. But it asked that the governor reassess and be prepared to reimpose the requirement if the situation worsens.
“We are cautiously optimistic that the current statewide school mask mandate can be safely relaxed in the near future, assuming current trends continue,” said a statement from the union’s officers.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Monday that she wants guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about when and how schools can lift these rules. She asked the agency to provide them in November, but it has not done so. Now she said she worries that policymakers could be changing the rules for the wrong reasons.
“We knew back in the fall that there needed to be an off-ramp on school mask mandates,” she said. “But it has to be informed by metrics and science, and not politics.”
The changes in state policies come as the national consensus shifts away from the need to protect Americans from the coronavirus and toward a sense that people will need to learn to manage the virus for a long time to come. Still, polling shows public support for masks in schools, so officials suggest that districts move cautiously.
The CDC has recommended face coverings as an important part of a virus mitigation strategy, saying that with masks, schools can operate safely even during times of high virus transmission in the community. Advocates for children with disabilities say masks are critical to protecting these children, some of whom cannot safely wear masks themselves. The American Academy of Pediatrics said Monday that its guidance recommending universal masking in schools has not changed.
Nathaniel Beers, a pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital in the District who helped write the AAP’s school guidance, said he would like to see CDC guidelines about when to lift — and when to reinstitute — mask requirements. He said it’s possible that this would be appropriate in some communities now.
“In most jurisdictions, rushing to unmask is probably slightly premature,” he said. “But we are getting closer than we have ever been.”
It’s important that policies respond to “objective data,” such as lower incidence of the virus in a region and high vaccination rates, said Jennifer Lighter, a hospital epidemiologist and pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone.
“That to me is a good, objective reason to go back on measures. I don’t think just because everyone is tired of masks is a good reason,” she said.
But others, particularly conservatives, view mask mandates as intrusive efforts to manage a decision that rightfully belongs to parents. Responding to the raft of mandates ending Monday, Youngkin said, “We are pleased to see that other states, including New Jersey and Delaware, are following our reasoning and a path to normalcy.”
The shift around masking in schools appears to be part of a watershed moment as society moves toward coexistence with the virus, said Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Still, she stressed that “we’re not yet done with this virus.”
Even with steps forward, there are “so many unknowns ahead of us, and we need to be prepared for the possibility of taking a step back.”
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Two Uyghur women enter a highly surveilled bazaar in Hotan, in China's northwest Xinjiang region. (photo: Greg Baker/Getty Images)
At Beijing Olympics, China and IOC Accused of "Sportswashing" Amid Uyghur Abuses, Peng Shuai Censorship
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Human rights advocates say renewed international attention for China during the Winter Olympics should focus on rampant human rights violations occurring across the country."
Human rights advocates say renewed international attention for China during the Winter Olympics should focus on rampant human rights violations occurring across the country. It is incumbent upon the International Olympic Committee to deny countries the bid to host if they violate their citizens’ human rights, says Jules Boykoff, author and former member of the U.S. Olympic soccer team. While many have commended China’s “zero-COVID policy,” the emphasis on keeping infection rates low is distracting from other kinds of suffering, adds Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
The 2022 Winter Olympics are underway in Beijing, China. Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin for talks Friday, the opening day, as the United States diplomatically boycotts the games along with Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden, among other countries, including New Zealand.
Human rights groups accuse China of turning the Olympics into a “sportswashing” event and have condemned China’s mistreatment of Uyghurs and other Muslims. During Friday’s opening ceremonies, one of the Olympic torchbearers China selected was a Uyghur cross-country skier. After finishing 43rd in her Olympic debut the next day, she was kept away from reporters.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach was asked about the IOC’s message to China’s oppressed Uyghur population, insisted he would not comment on political issues.
THOMAS BACH: If at the end you would have Olympic Games that are only between national Olympic committees whose governments agree on every political situation, the games would lose their universality. And with their universality, they would lose their mission. And that would lead to the end of the Olympic Games. Now, the mission, if we cannot accomplish our mission to bringing the world together, then we are at great — at great risk.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Bach said he met this weekend with the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who disappeared after she made sexual assault allegations against a former high-ranking member of China’s ruling Communist Party. But the IOC has said it can’t say if there should be an investigation of her allegations. They said she at this point didn’t call for that. Peng Shuai spoke Sunday in what the Associated Press called a “controlled interview” in Beijing with French sports newspaper L’Équipe, where she denied the allegations as a Chinese Olympic Committee official looked on, and said she’s retiring from tennis competition. This comes as human rights advocates say the International Olympic Committee should do more to support athletes speaking out against human rights violations.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. Jules Boykoff is a former member of the U.S. Olympic soccer team, author of five books on the Olympics, including Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, his latest piece for Jacobin headlined “The Beijing Winter Olympics Are a Political Disaster.” Also with us, Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
And we welcome you to Democracy Now! Yaqiu, let’s begin with you. Talk about the Olympics and how they’re playing out right now, this latest story that has dominated — not inside China at all — Peng Shuai, who made these allegations against a high-level Chinese government — a former Chinese government official of sexual assault, and then it just disappeared from the Chinese internet, and she says she’s been completely misunderstood and is retiring from tennis. Talk about that and then, overall, the Olympics playing out in China now.
YAQIU WANG: Well, I mean, I kind of expected this to happen again, because the IOC said we were going to have our dinner, I mean, you know, now the dinner happened, and then it’s the same old thing: You know, “The post was misunderstood. I was fine. I was free.” So, I expected that to happen.
I have to emphasize that she is still completely wiped out from the Chinese internet. You know, you cannot know anything what she said recently. If you search the Chinese internet, anything about her was before she made the social media post. So, she’s still a censored topic inside of China. So, it really says, you know, whether the Chinese government is really allowing people to talk freely about this case. You know, I think we can assume that everything is still very controlled. So, that’s about her.
I mean, in terms of the Olympics, you know, now the athletes are playing. There are propaganda about the athletes. But if you criticize the government, you know, you can still be censored or harassed. And if you say something online, you can be — your public post can be removed, and your account can be suspended. So, there are a lot of propaganda: “Everything’s great. Look how beautiful everything is.” Then there are a lot of censorship going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Jules Boykoff, your piece for Jacobin, “The Beijing Winter Olympics Are a Political Disaster.” Why?
JULES BOYKOFF: Well, the Beijing Winter Olympics are a hotbed of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is flying in every direction. When we just listened to the International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach cling desperately to the notion of political neutrality, it definitely brings to mind the great Desmond Tutu, who once said that if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. And it’s not just that that the International Olympic Committee is clinging to in terms of its own hypocrisy. It committed the original sin here in handing the Olympics to an obvious human rights violator, despite the lofty principles of its charter about human dignity.
But it doesn’t end with the International Olympic Committee. China itself has been hypocritical in these Olympic Games. They, too, like the International Olympic Committee, have been saying, “We need to keep politics out of the Olympics.” But it wasn’t that many years back when China itself was boycotting the Olympics. They did in 1980, the Moscow Games, because of the invasion of the Soviets in Afghanistan. They also boycotted the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.
And finally, the United States is quite hypocritical in this instance, as well. The Biden administration has carried out a diplomatic boycott against China and these Olympic Games, joined by a very few number of countries, I might add. But many people are looking at the United States waggling its finger China, and saying, “Hey, what about of Abu Zubaydah in Guantánamo Bay, tortured time and time again, waterboarded time and time again? What about those kids in cages at the border? What about the unquestioning support for Israel as they carry out an apartheid system against Palestinians? And while my friends over at Human Rights Watch and other places would rightly point to the fact that what’s happening in China is quite different right now — we’re seeing actual crimes against humanity happening as defined in the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court — the rest of the world is definitely seeing some hypocrisy from the United States.
And so, we’re definitely seeing with these Olympics that sports are more than sports, and the Beijing Games are a stark reminder of that.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve also pointed out, Jules Boykoff, in your pieces, the right-wing resistance against the games, going as far as stoking a kind of cold war with China.
JULES BOYKOFF: Absolutely. Many on the left are concerned that criticizing the Beijing 2022 Olympics on human rights grounds and other grounds risks opening up a Pandora’s box of anti-Asian hate, as well as the possibility of greenlighting war. After all, we’ve witnessed a bipartisan effort to gin up a new cold war with China. And unfortunately, war is a force that gives much of the U.S. political class meaning. We saw this at the end of 2021, when the U.S. Congress passed this whopping $770 billion defense bill, that had $24 billion more than Biden even asked for. And many pundits across the political spectrum pointed out that it was the rising power of China that necessitated this massive bill, including that extra $24 billion. And so, what we’re seeing right now with the Beijing Olympics is that they’re arriving at a time of heightened tensions between China and the West, including the United States, and it could well push in the wrong direction of war in this instance, which is exactly what the world doesn’t need right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, the Olympics are taking place during this pandemic. Yaqiu Wang, how is China dealing with this? I mean, the disparate numbers are amazing. We are recognizing 900,000 people died of COVID in the United States, with a population, what, a quarter of China. They’re saying like 8,000 people died. They’ve got four times more people in China. That disparity, even if it’s an underestimate, is astounding. Can you talk about COVID and the pandemic in China, and also how China and the athletes are being protected now?
YAQIU WANG: Well, I think it’s a fact that China has low infection rates, and the people are not dying from COVID. But I have to say, you know, the draconian controlling measures are making people suffering in other ways. You know, the Chinese government has made a zero infection rate a goal in itself. You can die from other issues, but don’t die from the COVID, because my — you know, as an official, my performance will be judged by how many people get infected. So there are stories, like a woman who’s eight months pregnant, she could not be admitted to the hospital because she didn’t have a negative COVID test result, so she lost her baby as a result. And people are dying from heart attacks because they couldn’t be admitted to the hospitals because they don’t have a COVID-negative result. So, while it’s good that the infection rates are low, that people are not dying from COVID, but people are suffering from other things.
I have to mention that, you know, the policies — you know, some people think it’s a good policy. But the people don’t actually have a say in how the COVID policy is being carried out, whether they agree with it or not. It’s a top-down thing implemented by the government, that people have no choice. And if you speak critically of the government’s COVID policy, you can be censored, or you can be harassed. You can be thrown into prison. So, we have to keep that in mind.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, final comment, Jules Boykoff, on how the media is covering these Olympics around the world?
JULES BOYKOFF: Well, one thing that they are covering is the athlete dissent about these Olympic Games. There’s been a lot of consternation from athletes that have been put in quarantine, that have been unpleased with the kind of food that they’ve been getting and unpleased with the very system of testing. You see numerous athletes have their Olympic dreams scuppered on the shoals of COVID here. And, you know, it’s important to note, I think, in terms of wider context, that we’re seeing a rise of Olympic athletes speaking out for justice around the world.
The International Olympic Committee and its corporate partners trade on the popularity and esteem of Olympians, but athletes don’t get the enormous profits that the International Olympic Committee enjoys. In fact, one important contextual study that I think we should all be having in the backs of our minds as we watch these athletes on our screens is that, according to one study, Olympic athletes do not receive their fair share of the money pie. They compared the National Basketball Association, the English Premier League of football, and other major sports leagues, where athletes there receive around 45 to 60% of the revenues. With the Olympic athletes, it’s only 4.1% of the revenues. So, Olympians are what make the Olympics special, and yet they’re getting shortchanged when it comes to the money shuffle with the Olympic Games.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us, Jules Boykoff, author of five books on the politics of the Olympics, former professional athlete himself, former member of the U.S. Olympic soccer team, and Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Next up, the National Football League is run “like a plantation.” That’s the charge levied by former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores. He has filed a racial discrimination class-action lawsuit against the league. Seventy percent of NFL players are Black. All of the team owners are white. We’ll speak to former NFL player Donté Stallworth. Stay with us.
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"The push to blacklist firms that boycott the oil industry follows a meeting in December between politicians and ALEC." (photo: Shutterstock)
Rightwing Lobby Group ALEC Driving Laws to Blacklist Companies That Boycott the Oil Industry
Chris McGreal, Guardian UK
McGreal writes: "The group's strategy, which aims to protect large oil firms and other conservative-friendly industries, is modeled on legislation to punish divestment from Israel."
The American Legislative Exchange Council has drafted legislation modelled on efforts to block divestment from Israel
The influential rightwing lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) is driving a surge in new state laws to block boycotts of the oil industry. The group’s strategy, which aims to protect large oil firms and other conservative-friendly industries, is modelled on legislation to punish divestment from Israel.
Since the beginning of the year, state legislatures in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Indiana have introduced a version of a law drafted by Alec, called the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, to shield big oil from share selloffs and other measures intended to protest the fossil fuel industry’s role in the climate crisis. A dozen other states have publicly supported the intent of the legislation.
Texas has already begun compiling a list of companies to target for refusing to do business with the oil industry after the state passed a version of the law last year. Top of the list is the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock.
The push to blacklist firms that boycott the oil industry follows a meeting in December between politicians and Alec, a corporate-funded organisation that writes legislation for Republican-controlled states to adopt and drive conservative causes.
At that meeting in San Diego, members of Alec’s energy taskforce voted to promote the model legislation requiring banks and financial companies to sign a pledge to not boycott petroleum companies in order to obtain state contracts. The wording closely resembles that of laws drafted by Alec and adopted in more than 30 states to block support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
Similar laws are also being promoted to protect the gun industry from boycotts.
The legislation written by Alec, which has a history of extreme denial of the climate crisis, claims that “American and European fossil energy producers … are among the most socially and environmentally responsible companies in the world”. It laments that “corporations are boycotting fossil energy companies by refusing to provide them with products or services”, and says that share selloffs by financial funds hurt investors.
“Banks are increasingly denying financing to creditworthy fossil energy companies solely for the purpose of decarbonizing their lending portfolios and marketing their environmental credentials,” the draft legislation says.
“This model bill proposes a strategy in which states use their collective economic purchasing power to counter the rise of politically motivated and discriminatory investing practices.”
The drive to pass the legislation follows the refusal of major financial firms to fund new oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. Banks and other financial institutions are also under pressure from environmental groups and customers to divest from fossil fuel companies. JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Goldman Sachs are among those firms to publicly commit to supporting the transition away from oil.
As with anti-BDS laws, any business with more than 10 employees would have to certify that it is not boycotting fossil fuel companies in order to do business with a state government. State funds, such as pensions, will usually be obliged to sell investments in corporations that refuse loans to the oil industry.
Alec’s push comes after the Texas legislature passed a version of the law in June 2021.
That legislation was backed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an active member of Alec that is funded in part by Koch Industries, which accused Wall Street firms of “colluding in a coordinated attack against Texas and our way of life” by denying capital to oil firms.
TPPF, which has several members also working inside Alec and maintains close ties to Senator Ted Cruz and rightwing former Texas governor Rick Perry, then pushed for the law to be adopted by other states.
Jason Isaac, a former Texas state legislator who now heads TPPF’s initiative to defend the oil industry, sent a memo to participants in the Alec meeting in San Diego in which he criticised “woke” banks and other financial institutions he accused of “colluding to deny lending and investment in fossil fuel companies”.
“The following model policy is based on anti-BDS legislation supported by ALEC regarding Israel and was recently passed in Texas to include discrimination against fossil fuels. Voting for this model policy, and encouraging more state legislatures to adopt it, will send a strong message that the states will fight back against woke capitalism,” the memo said, which was obtained by Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy.
In January, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick asked the state comptroller to put BlackRock, which manages an estimated $10tn worth of assets, at the top of its list of blacklisted companies because he said its pledge to work toward decarbonising the energy sector “will destroy the oil and gas industry and destabilize the economy worldwide”.
Patrick accused BlackRock chairman and CEO Larry Fink and his executives of making reassuring statements in private by saying the company “was committed to Texas and Texas’s vast energy footprint” but taking a different position in public by pledging to pressure energy firms to work toward net zero.
“Therefore, BlackRock is boycotting energy companies by basing investment decisions on whether a company pledges to meet BlackRock’s ‘net zero’ goals,” Patrick wrote.
BlackRock, which stands to lose about $20bn in Texas public sector pension funds, in fact remains a significant shareholder in oil and gas companies through index funds.
“BlackRock does not boycott energy companies,” it said in a statement to the Guardian. “We do not pursue divestment from oil and gas companies as a policy. We expect to continue to be invested in these companies and will work with them as they drive the energy transition to maximize long-term value for our clients. Our primary concern with the law is the potential negative consequences it could have on current and future Texas pensioners.”
The anti-BDS legislation has faced legal challenges after residents of Dickinson, Texas, were required to sign pledges not to boycott Israel in order to receive hurricane damage relief and a teacher in Kansas was told she had to do the same to keep her job.
Several states were forced to amend anti-BDS laws to restrict it to larger companies after courts ruled that requiring individuals to sign pledges not to boycott Israel intruded on free speech rights.
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A Fed spokesperson has provided Wall Street On Parade with a detailed response to our article yesterday, which documented that trades were made in accounts in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell had a financial interest during a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in 2015 and another in 2019. Fed officials are clearly prohibited from trading before and during FOMC meetings because that is when they have insider, market-moving information.
