Amy Coney Barrett and the Right’s Elite-Building Problem

This week Amy Coney Barrett joined John Roberts and the three liberal Supreme Court justices to leave in place a lower court order requiring the Trump administration to pay out nearly $2 billion in foreign aid reimbursements for contracts that had already been fulfilled and that the White House sought to cancel. This prompted anti-Barrett outrage among some conservative influencers, complete with epithets like “D.E.I. hire” and “D.E.I. judge.”

Anti-Barrett sentiment has been building for a while on the populist right; she’s been a conservative vote on the biggest cases of the past few years, from abortion to affirmative action, but she’s broken with the other conservatives on smaller issues in a way that’s consistent enough to constitute a pattern. (Though the data suggests that she’s overall still slightly less of a swing vote than Brett Kavanaugh.)