Two days ago, Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the 5–4 majority that ruled against President Trump in the case of Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. This has occasioned a great deal of criticism of Barrett from the right — to the point at which many commentators have felt comfortable describing her as a “mistake,” or even as a “DEI hire.”

This is nonsense. Barrett is a terrific justice, and, in most cases, those who are criticizing her are forgetting the proper role of the judiciary. Yes, in this case I think Barrett got it wrong. On this, I agree with NR’s editors. But that’s going to happen from time to time with judges who refuse to be drones. Barrett is extremely intelligent, and she has a coherent and thoughtful approach toward the law. There is precisely no evidence that she is motivated by hostility (or obsequiousness) toward Donald Trump or that she’s a coward or a squish, or that she’s “evolving” in office toward a living constitutionalist (read: completely made-up) position. Barrett voted with the majority in overturning Roe, in killing affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., and in upholding the Second Amendment in Bruen (she has some quibbles with the methodology in the lattermost case, as is her right). She’s been terrific on issues concerning separation of powers and freedom of religion, and on protecting the authority of the legislature. She is a solid originalist, and, on that score, she is better than all but a handful of the justices who have served in the modern era.

Over the last four years, I’ve disagreed with Barrett a few times, but never because I’ve thought she was playing games, engineering a preferred outcome, or giving in to political pressure. As a former legal academic, Barrett clearly has some procedural preferences — she’s more hawkish on standing than many, she’s skeptical of the virtues of the emergency docket, and she dislikes reaching the merits of a big case when the details aren’t entirely clear — and she follows those preferences rigorously. As far as I can see, this is what she did here. While I agreed with the dissent rather than the majority (which did not present much of an argument), the fact that (1) temporary restraining orders are not supposed to be appealable and (2) the facts of this particular case were hotly disputed made a comprehensible Barrett-esque case against the Court’s getting involved this time. Were I a Supreme Court justice, I’d have come to the opposite conclusion, but my dissent would have been narrow rather than perplexed. This was not the sort of unmoored, mystical, shapeless garbage that we routinely got from John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy, and nobody should allow themselves to be persuaded otherwise.

To look at these narrow foibles and conclude that Barrett was a poor choice by Donald Trump thus strikes me as extreme and ridiculous. To go one further and complain that the problem with Barrett is that she does not automatically vote with the Trump administration strikes me as corrupt. Barrett is an excellent justice who takes her job seriously. Sometimes, her attachment to her prerequisites is going to benefit the team that appointed her, and sometimes it is not. Which is the whole point of the judiciary — or at least ought to be.