Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has openly said the Supreme Court can’t force a president to obey its rulings if that president chooses not to. “The Court lacks the power of the purse,” she said. “We lack the power of the sword.”
Barrett, 53, was nominated by Donald Trump in 2020 to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In a conversation with New York Times host Ross Douthat, she admitted that the court simply doesn’t have the tools to make a president comply with its decisions. “We interpret the Constitution, we draw on precedents, we have these questions of structure, and we make the most with the tools that we have,” she said when Douthat asked what would happen if a president ignored a Supreme Court ruling.
Throughout the interview, Barrett discussed her guiding philosophy — “originalism.” She described it as a way of interpreting the Constitution “with the meaning that the words of the Constitution had at the time that it was ratified.”
When asked about what originalists believe regarding presidential power, Barrett pointed to the “unitary executive theory.” That theory says the president has full control over the executive branch, including the ability to remove officials without restriction. But not everyone in the originalist camp agrees. Caleb Nelson, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas and a noted originalist scholar, has warned that following the “unitary executive theory” could give the president “an enormous amount of power.”
“That’s essentially the debate that we’re seeing play out in some of the cases on the court’s docket now,” Barrett said. The Supreme Court, now dominated by six conservative justices, has often ruled in favor of Trump in recent years, frequently dividing along partisan lines.
Still, Barrett has pushed back against being seen as politically loyal. She’s said before that she is “nobody’s justice.” She has also joined the court’s liberal justices in the past, including a vote rejecting Trump’s attempt to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. At the end of its last term, the court delivered several major wins for the Trump administration.
“Once the vote doesn’t come out that way—once it’s 7 to 2, 8 to 1 or even unanimous—then nobody talks about those cases,” Barrett said, when asked why the most talked-about rulings tend to split along ideological lines.
Later in the interview, Barrett was cautious about answering questions on how far a president could go in testing the court’s limits. She said she wasn’t sure how to respond to a scenario where the executive branch might “box the Supreme Court in” or use the law in “disingenuous” ways.
She also declined to weigh in on whether the Supreme Court has an “obligation” to act as a “protector of the entire judicial branch” when facing attacks from the president, a reference to Trump’s public criticism of judges who rule against him.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear several Trump-related cases in November, December, and January.
