What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong about ACB

No, Justice Barrett isn't shifting left, and she's not "making it up as she goes along" either.

Amy Coney Barrett can’t catch a break. After she issued the majority opinion in Trump v. CASA—limiting the power of district courts to issue nationwide injunctions—the left came down on her, hard. The leading progressive legal podcast, “Strict Scrutiny,” vehemently criticized Donald Trump’s third nominee to the high court, with University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman calling her a “stone cold bitch.”

Throughout the winter and spring, on the other hand, Justice Barrett had instead faced significant backlash from the right for repeatedly siding with liberal justices against the administration. In January, she voted alongside Chief Justice John Roberts and the three Democratic-appointed justices to not delay President Donald Trump’s sentencing for his New York convictions before his inauguration. In March, she joined the same justices to reject the administration’s request to pause an order requiring it to pay $2 billion in foreign aid that DOGE had tried to freeze. In April, she dissented alongside the liberals from a decision to stay judicial orders preventing the government from removing noncitizens who are designated as members of a Venezuelan gang.

So what’s going on here? Was she “showing signs of a leftward drift,” as so many Republican-appointed justices had before? Is she conservative, moderate, or just unpredictable?