'I'm nobody's justice!' Amy Coney Barrett insists she's not in Trump's pocket

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett pushed back on claims that she’d become "President Donald Trump’s justice," and instead characterized herself as being “nobody’s justice” in a recent interview with USA Today published Monday.

"I'm nobody's justice,” she told the outlet in an exclusive interview. “...The kind of overall patterns, or how any of us might feel about those abstract issues, aren’t the stuff of which judicial decisions are made, [and courts] have to stay in their lane.”

Appointed in 2020 by Trump, Barrett has helped deliver the president a number of wins with her votes on the bench, including the landmark decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, which she previously complained affected her vacation. However, she’s also issued several votes in which she defied Trump’s wishes, including a recent vote where she joined liberal justices in rejecting Trump’s freeze on foreign aid.

Barrett rejected claims that her less-than 100% pro-Trump voting record made her a swing vote: “Swing, I think, implies indecisiveness; you just kind of blow back and forth, and that’s not how I approach the law at all.”

She also noted that since George Washington, presidents have always hoped their appointments to the nation’s highest court would be “their” justices, a hope that she argued had been dashed every time.

“And throughout history, presidents have been disappointed by what their justices with those appointments have done,” Barrett said.

Barrett regularly issues decisions that support Trump’s agenda, but insists every instance is merely a case of the law aligning with the matter being litigated, and in a way that falls in Trump’s favor. One topic where she has a clear break from Trump is on the death penalty.

Barrett has stated in the past that she’s personally opposed to the death penalty, something Trump not only supports but wants to extend to drug dealers. Yet despite her personal position on the matter, Barrett insists that all of her decisions are based solely on the law as she interprets it.

“Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is,” Barrett wrote in her new memoir, set to be released later this month. “If I decide a case based on my judgment about what the law should be, I’m cheating.”