Justice Amy Coney Barrett packed two very different messages into her one-page opinion on Monday as the Supreme Court declared states could not toss former President Donald Trump off the ballot.
She chastised her colleagues on the right for breaking significant – and in her mind unnecessary – ground in the breadth of their legal reasoning.
But then she admonished the court’s three liberal justices, who also split from the majority’s legal rationale, in unusually biting terms.
“In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” Barrett wrote. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”
