Amy Coney Barrett disagreed with the majority over Trump, but admonished the liberals instead

Justice Amy Coney Barrett packed two very different messages into her one-page opinion on Monday as the Supreme Court declared states could not toss former President Donald Trump off the ballot.

 

She chastised her colleagues on the right for breaking significant – and in her mind unnecessary – ground in the breadth of

The 52-year-old appointee of Trump emphasized that the justices were more in sync than not, suggesting that the liberals’ writing subverted that fact.

“All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” Barrett wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”

Yet Barrett’s statement, joined by no other justice, had the effect of highlighting the tensions between ideological factions and the power of the conservative majority, rather than neutralizing them. Liberal justices, often in the dissent, regularly adopt a caustic tone. It was paradoxical that Barrett herself, in rebuking them on Monday, chose words with more bite than usual.

The ideological strains inside the court will likely grow as the justices hear another chapter of Trump election-related litigation in April and begin issuing decisions this spring on various challenges to Biden administration policy.

But then she admonished the court’s three liberal justices, who also split from the majority’s legal rationale, in unusually biting terms.

“In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” Barrett wrote. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”