Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered an icy rebuke of Hillary Clinton in a wide-ranging interview.
Barrett was part of the conservative majority that voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, ending decades of precedent upholding a constitutional right to an abortion. Democrats, including Clinton, have said the Supreme Court's move unsettled the legal foundations of other rights that were established by the courts, such as same-sex marriage.
The Supreme Court has faced mounting criticism as it has turned to the right since Trump's first term, when Barrett was seated along with two other conservatives. Democrats, the media, and the court's own liberal justices have accused the Supreme Court of acting as a rubber stamp for Trump and his supposed war on "our democracy."
In a new CBS interview promoting her book, Barrett emphasized that the court's role is to interpret the law, regardless of what the public wants - even famous people like Clinton.
"So when Hillary Clinton, for example, says what’s next, she said, ‘my prediction is the court will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion,’'" interviewer Norah O'Donnell said.
"I think people who criticize the court who are outside say a lot of different things, but again the point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out," Barrett replied.
Some conservative justices on the Supreme Court have shown interest in revisiting Obergefell v. Hodges, the historic 2015 ruling that established a right to same-sex marriage nationwide. Critics of the ruling have said it short-circuited the democratic process and effectively fashioned a new legal right without any basis in the Constitution.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who Barrett clerked for in the past, famously said at the time that Obergefell replaced actual legal analysis with the "mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."
Justice Barrett cited Scalia's vigorous approach to his job as she discussed her own recent smackdown of liberal colleague Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Barrett had accused Jackson of departing from "more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself" in an opinion that drew wide attention. Quoting Scalia, Barrett said, "I attack ideas. I don't attack people."
"That is the spirit in which, you know, I write my opinions," she said.
Defending her role in overturning Roe, Barrett argued the decision did not make abortion illegal but instead gave power back to the people to decide an important question.
"You know, the court was in the business of drawing a lot of those lines before, and what Dobbs says is that those calls are properly left to the democratic process. And the states have been working those out. There's been a lot of legislative activity and a lot of state constitutional activity since the decision in Dobbs was rendered," Barrett said.
Barrett clearly has no apologies about ending Roe, and she did not seem to rule out the chance - however remote it may seem - of Obergefell being overturned, too.
We wager that Clinton will not be thrilled with Barrett's comments in this interview.
