A new Economist/YouGov poll is a rich text for political observers of the Supreme Court. The court is unpopular (only 36 percent of American adults approve). It is hated by Democrats (80 percent of whom disapprove of the Court). And his approval rating among Republicans is surprisingly soft, given that the GOP controls six of the Court’s nine seats. Only 69 percent of Republicans approve.
The most famous justice, meanwhile, is Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Although President Donald Trump’s most recent appointment to the Court is a conservative Republican, he is slightly above water within his own party – a result that is not surprising, because Barrett recently are criticized by several parliamentarians of extreme right-wing politics and journalists.
In rush to big decisions that the justices released in late June, Barrett joined two 5-4 decisions that ruled against Trump and his Republican Party. And not just any issues, but two that have become increasingly important to the right of the MAGA era: elections and immigration.
For many Supreme Court experts, the biggest surprise in both cases is that the vote was so close. In Watson v. Republican National Committee (2026), Republicans challenged a Mississippi law that allowed ballots mailed before Election Day, but arriving up to five days later, to be counted — despite the fact that states have counted late-arriving ballots. since the Civil War. And, in Trump vs. Barbara (2026), Barrett also rejected Trump’s argument that the provision of the constitution, which makes most people born in the United States citizens, has been misread by the Supreme Court by almost 130 years.
But these decisions provoked angry reactions from many allies of Trump, who had built the case of votes in the margins against the non-existent fraud of the election proposed by the president and the case of birthright citizenship in the last stand against the constant fear of immigration “invasion.”
Watson it prompted unsupported claims from Republicans such as Justice Samuel Alito that “counting late votes” would allow fraudsters to “stuff ballot boxes when early election results suggest a tight race.” Barbaraat the same time, it raised fears that foreign nationals are coming to the United States in large numbers give birth to a US citizen.
Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) called on Barrett to “removed from the Bench.” Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) called him Watson comments “terrible” and “terrible.” Matt Walsh, a podcaster with over 4 million followers on X, called it “DEI rent.” Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor, said Barrett is “turncoat.” One of the most offensive responses to Barrett, by right-wing pastor Joel Webbon, suggested that he he is not fit for court service, because he adopted two Black children.
Trump was outraged by the decisions, but did not specifically single out Barrett. In 2025, CNN reported that the person who put Barrett on the Supreme Court was he complained privately that he was “weak.”
Opposition to Barrett is not universal. He has many prominent supporters among Republicans. And any suggestion that he is some kind of centrist squish is not supported by the facts. Rather than do it myself, I’ll just quote it the motion of the National Review that Barrett is a conservative rightist who has delivered victory after victory to Republican causes:
Barrett has stood boldly with his peers in one historic conservative victory after another: overturning Roe v. Wade amid threats to the safety of judges, strengthening the Second Amendment, ending racial bias, rejecting the ideology of transgender people, protecting religious freedom, expanding access to school elections, returning to authoritarian government, attacking the entire country by sabotaging elections. rowdy district judges, striking down laws that sought to imprison Trump and throw him off the ballot, blocking one Joe Biden robbery after another. This term has been no different, with Barrett joining in on decisions to end racially segregated districts, allow Trump to fire agency heads at will, protect girls’ sports from transgender male athletes, and defend the religious freedom of abortion centers and transgender counselors.
Still, the latest polling suggests that voices like Mace, Walsh, and Kelly are shaping how much the Republican Party views Barrett. And Trump’s complaints about 2025 show that whoever he appoints to the Court in the near future is unlikely to show even the average score that Barrett has shown. Last April, Trump named Justice Samuel Alito, the Court many unapologetic Republicans,”one of the greatest justices of all time.”
So why does Barrett sometimes abandon MAGA?
Surprisingly, the two most MAGA-leaning judges were not appointed by Trump. They are Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, Republican appointees of the first and second Bush presidents – although there are early indications that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee, it may be moving in Alito’s direction.
One possible reason for Trump’s judges’ incomplete loyalty to him is that Trump relied heavily on the Federal Societya kind of bar association for conservative lawyers, to choose judges and its first round judges. Although the Federalist League often promotes right-wing legislative theories, its goals don’t always align with Trump’s. At the meeting of the Federal Federation in the summer of 2025, for example, Many speakers criticized Trump’s tariffs – that criticism preceded the Court’s decision reduce most of those taxes down. In particular, Trump had disagree with Leonard Leoco-chairman of the board of the Federalist Society, early in his second term.
Still, Barrett’s ties to the Federalist community cannot fully explain why he sided with Trump more often than Thomas and Alito, as the latter two justices are also proud members of the community who regularly speak at his major events. The most likely reason why Barrett sometimes breaks with Trump is more banal: Lawyers can’t see the future.
All Supreme Court Judges heavily scrutinized by lawyers from the White House or the Department of Justice to ensure that they are conceptually reliable. But this investigation can only accomplish so much. If a vacancy opens up on the Supreme Court today, the Trump White House can ensure that whoever it nominates will have the same views that the Republican Party holds today. But it is clear that it could not anticipate what the Republican Party will want to accomplish a decade from now and elect judges who will continue that agenda.
For example, consider Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican who President George W. Bush appointed in 2005. At the time, one of the most contentious questions before the federal courts was whether Bush could detain terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, and Roberts was reliable polls support Bush’s views on this issue. Roberts’ record also showed that he agreed with conservative Republicans on a variety of issues that had strong positions in 2005, such as. voting rights or how the Constitution deals with racial issues.
But the White House could not have known that, more than a year after Bush left office, Bush’s successor would sign the health care law that the Republican Party hated like a supernova. And so, Roberts vote important to save much of Obamacare in 2012although all four of his Republican colleagues at the time opposed it.
Barrett’s break with MAGA is similar to Roberts’ vote in the Obamacare case. They usually include questions that weren’t on Trump’s White House radar when he was nominated in 2020 and that often still divide Republicans today.
Just as Guantanamo Bay led to Bush’s nomination of Roberts, Republicans in 2020 considered replacing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and abortion opponent, and. Barrett fits the bill. He joined the Court’s decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which removed the constitutional right to abortion.
But Republicans have changed since Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court. During the Covid-era election that Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, Trump began attacking mail-in voting. These attacks altered voting systems – Democrats are now more likely to cast ballots than Republicans – and top Republicans noticed this change. Watson it was an attempt to throw out a bunch of random ballots on the theory that doing so would hurt the Democrats.
But the GOP’s turn against mail-in voting was still in its infancy when Barrett was nominated in September 2020. It likely never occurred to White House lawyers who probed Barrett to see if he would vote to repeal a Mississippi-like law.
Similarly, the question of citizenship at birth in the heart of Barbara it was one of the most controversial questions in American law until Trump tried to end birthright citizenship in 2025. When Justice John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who was the first judge to reject Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, announced his decision, he declared that he “has been on the bench for more than four decades,” and “cannot recall another case where the question presented is as clear as this.”
However, whatever may be said about GOP views in 2020, when Barrett was nominated, Barrett’s views on election law and citizenship are now out of step with a prominent faction within the Republican Party. Vice President JD Vance described birthright citizenship as “poor immigration policy in the world.”
That’s one reason to keep an eye on MAGA’s opposition to Barrett. Future Republican Houses will likely scrutinize any judicial nominee very closely to ensure that they will vote to end birthright citizenship, regardless of what the Constitution says.
