Interviewing a sitting Supreme Court justice isn’t that different from interrogating a Supreme Court nominee from a Senate desk: In each case you know that you probably aren’t going to get answers to some of the most important questions. You have to ask them anyway, which is why my conversation with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, my guest this week on “Interesting Times,” includes a couple of direct questions about the Trump administration — its attacks on lower courts, its attempt to seize substantial policy ground before courts have time to rule — that earned me very short nonanswers. But my goal in the discussion was to push Barrett on a question that she could answer: How much does a theory like Originalism, Barrett’s school of judicial thought and the dominant perspective on the court today, bend and flex in response to prudential and political concerns? Is the court just in the business of discerning the original meaning of the Constitution without fear or favor, even if — as in the Dobbs decision, which we discussed at length — it requires overturning precedent on a polarizing issue? Or do even justices committed to the plain text of the law necessarily tailor their decisions to the exigencies of a given moment — like, say, a moment with an increasingly Caesarist president, a supine Congress and support for defying the court percolating on both the right and left? Barrett belongs firmly to the no-fear-or-favor camp. I think real-world politics constantly test and limit that ideal. So our conversation often involved my attempts to find those limits: the ways in which, by necessity, a Supreme Court whose decisions have the power to reshape Trumpian political realities will find itself shaped by those realities as well. Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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