Amy Coney Barrett becomes the Supreme Court's key swing vote
Barrett wrote the 6-3 Rutherford majority and broke with Trump in a February tariffs case, sharpening her role as the Court's decisive vote.
Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion in Rutherford v. United States, a 6-3 decision issued on May 28, 2026, and her vote in a February tariffs fight showed how often she now sits at the center of the Supreme Court's changing coalitions. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump on February 20, Barrett joined Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch on the side against President Donald J. Trump, a split that underscored how the conservative bloc no longer moves in lockstep.
That pattern has made Barrett the Court's pressure point. The Supreme Court's 2025-26 term has been more ideologically divided than the previous term by several measures, but the sharpest disagreements have often come inside the right side of the bench rather than in a simple 6-3 pattern. Barrett has said publicly that critics call her too conservative when she votes with Republican-appointed justices and too liberal when she does not, a description that fits a term in which her vote can change both the outcome and the reasoning.
Her confirmation locked in the Court's current shape. The Senate confirmed Barrett on October 26, 2020, after the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced her nomination over Democratic objections, and the vote came just days before the 2020 election. It cemented a 6-3 conservative majority and gave Barrett immediate leverage in cases where the six Republican-appointed justices are not aligned.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 28, 1972, Barrett has now moved well beyond the politics of her confirmation. The question in the current term is not whether the Court is conservative. It is whether Barrett can hold that conservative majority together, or whether her vote will keep redrawing its boundaries one case at a time.
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