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Even as a number of judges at the entry level of the federal court system, the district courts, have complained in anonymous interviews with NBC that they don’t like it when the Supreme Court overturns their politically driven decisions, a member of that high court is warning they are supposed to be playing by the rules that already are established – by voters, through Congress and the president.
It was in a series of interviews with federal judges whose identities were concealed that NBC reported they were unhappy that their decisions were not followed by the Supreme Court.
Some of those district court decisions, however, have clearly pushed political agendas in opposition to the president, on things like national security, international affairs, spending, social ideologies, and more. One radical judge even tried to order jets deporting illegal alien criminals turned around mid-flight to return the criminals to the U.S., without an acknowledgement that those jets could have run out of fuel before completing a return.
Now it is Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett who explained judges’ personal beliefs should not enter into the equation when decisions are made. Those decisions should be based on the laws that exist.
Those district judges, she said, are “not kings.”
She wrote, in an article for the Free Press, that judges are “referees” who determine, or should be determining, that everyone is following the rules.
“We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process,” she said.
On the restraint judges must exercise, Justice Amy Coney Barrett writes, “We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process.” https://t.co/NewprhYtUn
— The Free Press (@TheFP) September 3, 2025
Justice Amy Coney Barrett firmly believes that her personal views should not compete with her duty to uphold the Constitution: “The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice.” https://t.co/NewprhYtUn
— The Free Press (@TheFP) September 3, 2025
“If I distort the law to make it difficult for them to impose the death penalty, I interfere with the voters’ right to self-government,” writes Justice Barrett on not letting her personal views clash with her duty as a judge. https://t.co/N8ygSh6wzM
— The Free Press (@TheFP) September 3, 2025
She said of the judiciary, “Like Americans more generally, judges hold diverse views about the values by which a just society should live. Yet under the Constitution, the choice between these competing views is made by citizens in the democratic process, not by judges settling disputes.
“On the bench, we must suppress our individual beliefs in deference to those that have prevailed in the enacted law. Our job is to protect the choices that citizens have made, even when we disagree with them…”
Judges should be deciding “whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be.”
She cited her own personal objections to the death penalty.
“For me, death penalty cases drive home the collision between the law and my personal beliefs. Long before I was a judge – before I was even a member of the bar – I co-authored an academic article expressing a moral objection to capital punishment,” she said. “Because prisoners sentenced to death almost always challenge their sentences on appeal, the tension between my beliefs and the law is not one that I could avoid as a young law clerk, much less now as a judge.
“The people who adopted the Constitution didn’t share my view of the death penalty, and neither do all my fellow citizens today,” she added “If I distort the law to make it difficult for them to impose the death penalty, I interfere with the voters’ right to self-government.”
