Justice Amy Coney Barrett recounted her first months on the Supreme Court on Thursday night, remembering how she felt "confined and imprisoned" by her new life under a security detail.
"I have conversations with my young teenage daughter, and she's embarrassed because she gets picked up in an armored vehicle," Barrett said at the Federalist Society's 41st annual dinner at the Washington Hilton, where she was interviewed by Judge Lisa Branch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
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"Shortly after I was confirmed, I went to visit my parents, who I hadn't seen in almost a year because of the pandemic," Barrett said, noting one change that struck her was the limitation on being able to drive shortly before and after her confirmation.
"They knew that I was feeling confined and imprisoned by all this security," she told Branch, along with an audience of nearly 2,500 lawyers, federal judges, and members of the conservative legal community in attendance.
“My dad just held up the keys and said, ‘Go,’” Barrett recounted. “So, I took their SUV. I just kind of drove up and down I-10. I had the window down, and I was going above the speed limit, the music blaring … like a teenager or something.”
"That wasn't something that I anticipated," Barrett said of the high-level security around her, adding that at some point after Justice Antonin Scalia's death, the Supreme Court began providing more security protections for the justices, "even during the confirmation process."
After the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court's draft opinion signaling the imminent 6-3 ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade, security measures were amplified, more specifically for the justices' family members, in the wake of threats against the justices and protest marches outside of their private homes.
Although she didn't reference the 2022 protests on Thursday, Barrett was also a guest speaker at last year's 40th annual dinner along with Justice Samuel Alito. There, she was welcomed by a roaring applause at the ballroom in Union Station, where she said, "It’s really nice to have a lot of noise made, but not by protesters outside of my house."
Barrett's confirmation by a 51-48 Senate vote on Oct. 25, 2020, marked former President Donald Trump's final nomination to the high court to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cementing a 6-3 Republican-appointed majority. Trump was helped in part by the Federalist Society's Co-Chairman Leonard Leo, who helped draft the former president's short list of nominees.
Hours before Barrett's speech, the Senate Judiciary Committee started debating whether to send a pair of subpoenas, including one to Leo, as part of its investigation of Supreme Court ethics. The committee ultimately punted on voting for the subpoenas Thursday after vehement disagreement from Republican committee members.
Democrats and mostly left-leaning judiciary advocates have been calling on the Supreme Court to adopt a stricter set of recusal and disclosure rules that they argue are needed after ProPublica revealed Justice Clarence Thomas was provided free travel and trips to luxury locations by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. Alito was similarly provided a trip by billionaire Paul Singer on an Alaskan fishing trip.
Outside of the lavish hotel ballroom dinner, a group of protesters critical of Leo and the high court called for heightened ethics scrutiny, wearing robes mimicking the ones worn by justices that were covered with the names and logos of conservative dark money groups. One wore a T-shirt with a message: “SCOTUS is not for sale.”
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The same four conservative justices who attended last year's dinner (Alito, Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch) were all in attendance Thursday night.
Conversely, some Democratic-appointed jurists, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, attend events hosted by liberal organizations such as the American Constitution Society.