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'I’ve got news for her': Ex-US attorney lectures Coney Barrett on tyranny risk

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett got a dressing down from a former U.S. attorney for comments she made in her majority opinion on birthright citizenship which handed Donald Trump a win on Friday.

In a highly-criticized response to a dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Coney Barrett dismissively wrote, "We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

With Coney Barrett relying heavily on the writings of the founding fathers, long before the 14th Amendment was added, University of Alabama Law School professor and ex-U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance begged to differ.

Over multiple posts on Bluesky she first wrote, "If Justice Barrett thinks we need to go back to what the Founding Fathers intended, I’ve got news for her. Their biggest concern was avoiding tyranny. So they created 3 branches of gov’t & divvied up the power the people (that’s us) were allowing the gov’t to use to create order for all of us."

She added, "I think about this a lot, b/c I’m finishing up a book on democracy (I’d love it if you’d preorder it). If you read the Federalist Papers, which all of the conservative justices-good members of the Federalist Society have, you know the FF spilled a lot of ink debating how best to avoid tyranny."

Providing a link she suggested, "Federalist 10, with its discussion of factions, is a great place to start. The Founding Fathers wanted to make sure no small group could take over the reins of power and impose its will on other Americans.," before adding, "It’s easy to say, well, no lawyers were using nationwide injunctions at the time of the founding. Of course, the country looked radically different then. The idea that we rely on “history” to support a certain faction’s views, while ignoring the FF’s most important goal is not what they intended."

"Thank you for coming to my Ted talk," she joked before continuing, "since the conservative majority on the Supreme Court does not seem to be paying attention. Sometimes the dissent tell us more about a case than the majority opinion. This is one of those times."

You can see Vance's posts here.