Judge Amy Coney Barrett takes a distinctive position in the Trump case

Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion was only a page long, all two paragraphs. But by distancing yourself from both blocks on Monday nominally unanimous decision of the Supreme Court She rejected a constitutional challenge to former President Donald J. Trump’s fitness to hold office and played a distinctive role.

Judge Barrett was the third of Mr. Trump’s appointees, rushed to the court after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and arriving just before the 2020 election. But she is seen as one of the more moderate members of the court’s six-member conservative supermajority. During oral arguments, she can convey a mix of intellectual seriousness and common sense.

During public appearances, she is convinced that the court is apolitical, even if she sometimes says so in locations that undermine her message.

In 2021, for example, Judge Barrett told an audience in Kentucky that “my goal today is to convince you that this court is not made up of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

She spoke at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center after an introduction by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader who helped found the center and was instrumental in securing her confirmation. She was last year too the featured speaker at the annual gala of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.

On the surface, her unanimous opinion on Monday was an act of solidarity with the court’s liberal members — and the other three women. Like her, Judge Barrett wrote that the majority had gone too far in the process of ruling that Colorado could not disqualify Mr. Trump from the primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars officials who have sworn to uphold the Constitution support and then engaged in rebellion against his office.

“I agree that states do not have the power to enforce Section 3 against presidential candidates,” she wrote. “That principle is sufficient to resolve this case, and I would decide no more than that.”

But the majority had decided much more than that, she wrote, saying detailed federal legislation is needed to give Section 3 force. Once again, she agreed with the court’s liberal bloc.

“This lawsuit was brought in state court by Colorado voters under state law,” Judge Barrett wrote. “It does not require us to answer the complicated question of whether federal law is the exclusive means by which Section 3 can be enforced.”

After determining that she was siding with her Liberal colleagues on the substance of what they had to say, she questioned their tone, calling it shrill. Members of the court who disagree with the majority, she said, face a choice, adding that her colleagues had made the wrong one.

“In my opinion, this is not the time to increase disagreement with stridency,” she wrote.

It is true that the joint opinion by the three liberals — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — contained some pointed comments, including quotes from the rulings in Bush v. Gore, the decision that settled the 2000 election, and Dobbs v. Gore. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which abolished the constitutional right to abortion.

But the joint agreement was not particularly harsh by the standards of recent dissent. Yet indeed it had apparently started as a partial dissentit was presented as an opinion concurring with the judgment, meaning that it accepted the majority’s premise but not its reasoning.

Yet Judge Barrett seemed to think her colleagues had crossed a line, to the detriment of the court and the nation.

“The court resolved a politically charged issue in the volatile presidential election season,” she wrote. “Especially in these circumstances, writings about the court should lower, not raise, the national temperature.”

Then she spoke to the nation.

“For present purposes,” she wrote, “our disagreements are far less important than our unanimity: all nine justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans need to take home.”