Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a new interview hit back at critics who say the Supreme Court’s conservative majority could ultimately ban gay marriage or make other monumental changes after it upended a long-standing ruling on abortion rights in 2022.
“It’s not just an opinion poll about whether the Supreme Court thinks something is good or whether the Supreme Court thinks something is bad,” Barrett told CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell in her first TV interview since joining the Supreme Court in 2020. “What the court is trying to do is see what the American people have decided.”
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“The Court should not be imposing its own values on the American people — that’s for the democratic process,” she added.
Barrett’s full interview will air on “CBS Sunday Morning” this weekend ahead of the release of her memoir “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” on Tuesday.
The former law professor told O’Donnell that she hopes her book will give people a better understanding of why the court decides cases the way that it does.
“I think people who criticize the court or who are outside say a lot of different things,” she said. “But again, the point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out.”
Barrett said she sees a difference between abortion rights and marriage rights. She wrote in her book that she views the rights to marry, engage in sexual intimacy, use birth control and raise children are “fundamental,” but the rights to do business, die by suicide and terminate a pregnancy are not.
“I was a con law professor for many years,” she told O’Donnell. “I described the doctrine in the book, and that is the state of the law.”
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When the high court overturned Roe v. Wade three years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas released a concurring opinion calling for also overturning the constitutional rights the court had affirmed for access to contraceptives and LGBTQ rights.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee who lost to President Trump in 2016, said in a podcast interview last month that she worries the court will upend the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that effectively legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
“It took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Clinton said. “The Supreme Court will hear a case about gay marriage; my prediction is they will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion — they will send it back to the states.”
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“American voters, and to some extent the American media, don’t understand how many years the Republicans have been working in order to get us to this point,” Clinton added.
Trump nominated Barrett, along with conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, during his first term after beating Clinton. All three voted with conservative Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito to end the federal protections for abortion rights in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
