By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a public appearance in March alongside liberals Justice Sonia Sotomayor said one way to promote compromise on the U.S. Supreme Court is to issue narrower rather than sweeping rulings.
“Not everything has to be decided in one opinion,” Barrett said.
She applied that view Monday in the court’s landmark ruling that former President Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for official acts undertaken in office. Barrett voted with her conservative colleagues but refused to join them on some of the opinion she considered went too far.
The court’s divisions between the six conservative justices and the three liberal justices are obvious. But there are also tensions within the conservative bloc, even though it has managed to move American law to the right since Trump nominated Barrett in 2020 to replace the late liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett’s arrival gave the Conservatives a stunning 6-3 majority.
Although Barrett typically votes with her conservative colleagues, she has increasingly stated her preference for narrower rulings and criticized their legal approaches, demonstrating a willingness to follow a more moderate path.
University of Notre Dame Law School professor Sherif Girgis said the court can rule more — or less — in a case as it sees fit.
“Judge Barrett seems more likely than others to use this flexibility to decide less, or to leave an issue for later resolution, especially if she thinks that ruling more would require the court to resolve a lot of open questions about how to implement an approach more comprehensive. “, said Girgis.
Girgis said it appears Barrett “thinks narrower rulings are better for the court’s standing with the public.”
In the immunity ruling, Barrett refused to endorse one of the main conclusions – that in any case against a former president, juries cannot consider evidence that concerns official acts – now considered largely immune – even in a criminal case based solely in private conduct, which is not shielded.
“The Constitution does not require blinding juries,” Barrett wrote, presenting the hypothetical situation of a former president being prosecuted for seeking or accepting bribes. Barrett noted that “to exclude from the trial any mention of the official act relating to the bribery would prejudice the prosecution.”
In this regard, Barrett aligned herself with the court’s liberal dissenters – Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Barrett also indicated reservations about the breadth of rulings in two other Trump-related cases.
The justices unanimously overturned in March a Colorado high court ruling that disqualified Trump from that state’s Republican presidential election after finding he had participated in an insurrection by inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
The majority of the court could have stopped there, but it still ruled that the constitutional provision in question can only be enforced through future legislation passed by Congress. Barrett declined to participate in that part. Opinions in politically charged cases, Barrett wrote, “should lower, not raise, the national temperature.”
Last Friday, Barrett was the only conservative judge to dissent from a ruling that raised the legal bar for prosecuting the Jan. 6 protesters, as well as Trump, on charges of corrupt obstruction of an official process.
‘OPENINGLY STRIDENT’
Liberals remain skeptical of Barrett.
“The hope that Judge Barrett will serve as a moderating presence for her more openly strident colleagues will remain elusive until they heed her call or she sides with the liberal justices in (a) case of great national importance,” Devon Ombres, from the left. said the inclined think tank Center for American Progress.
Barrett is part of the conservative majority that has rolled back abortion rights, expanded gun rights, rejected admissions to race-conscious universities and undermined the power of federal regulatory agencies.
But she is generally considered one of the court’s three ideologically central justices, alongside John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, although all three are unmistakably conservative.
Barrett joined liberals in dissent when the court blocked a key air pollution regulation. And she authored decisions upholding federal standards, giving Native Americans preferences in adopting Native American children and rejecting limits on contact between President Joe Biden’s administration and social media platforms. Both decisions concluded that Republican-led states or conservative plaintiffs lacked standing to sue.
Georgetown University law school professor Mary McCord noted that Barrett asked questions in the obstruction and immunity cases “probing whether there was a middle ground.”
“At least in these cases, as well as others in which she criticized the way some members of the court relied on history and tradition, she appears to want to issue opinions that allow for easier applications of the court’s ruling in future cases. ” McCord said.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; additional reporting by John Kruzel; editing by Will Dunham)
