To Barrett's critics, she represents the antithesis of the progressive values embodied in the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her life spent in a cocoon of like-minded thinking that in many areas runs counter to the views of a majority of Americans
Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, at the Capitol in Washington, Sept. 29, 2020. As Barrett’s confirmation hearings are set to begin, her background and résumé mark a stark departure from more traditional nominees to the Supreme Court. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
On a winter afternoon in 2018, Judge Amy Coney Barrett rose to speak in Notre Dame Law School’s courtroom and thanked the people gathered there for joining her for her official investiture as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
In the audience were her parents, in town from her childhood home in New Orleans, and her husband, along with six of their seven children. And there were many friends — from law school, her Supreme Court clerkship and her Catholic parish in South Bend, Indiana.
Also in attendance were a number of prominent conservative legal figures, mentors who had helped make this moment happen. But perhaps the most important was a Notre Dame graduate whose eyes were on the future.
That graduate, Don McGahn, President Donald Trump’s White House counsel, was known for his single-minded focus on remaking the federal judiciary according to his own conservative views. Contacts at his alma mater had lauded Barrett, then a professor, and even before Trump’s inauguration he had envisioned someone like her as a new kind of powerhouse on the Supreme Court — an outsider of unbending conviction on social issues.
“We now affectionately call her Judge Dogma,” McGahn joked when he got up to speak at the ceremony, a reference to a remark by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., at Barrett’s confirmation hearing questioning her ability to separate her religion from the law.
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