Supreme Court Justice Barrett Defends Dobbs Decision, Says Judges Should ‘Tune Out’ Critics Like Hillary

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett isn’t backing down from one of the Court’s most consequential rulings in decades. On CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday, Barrett made it clear that the Dobbs decision—which overturned Roe v. Wade—was about restoring power to the people and their elected representatives, not imposing morality from the bench.

“Dobbs did not render abortion illegal. Dobbs did not say anything about whether abortion is immoral. Dobbs said that these are questions that are left to the states,” Barrett explained. She noted that the Court had spent years “in the business of drawing a lot of those lines” and that Dobbs corrected course by returning such decisions to the democratic process. Since then, states have taken up the issue directly, with vigorous legislative debates and even constitutional amendments decided by voters.

Barrett also addressed critics like Hillary Clinton, who has suggested the Court could roll back gay marriage next. “I think people who criticize the court who are outside say a lot of different things,” Barrett responded, adding that justices must “tune those things out” rather than allow political noise to guide constitutional interpretation.

Her remarks come ahead of the release of her book Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, which debuts September 9. In it, Barrett underscores the role of judges as neutral arbiters rather than activists: “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.”

She goes further: “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…” As Barrett reminds, “They [judges] are referees, not kings, because they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be.”

Her defense of Dobbs highlights a critical principle too often ignored by activist judges: the Constitution is not a tool for imposing ideology but a framework for safeguarding liberty and self-government. That’s why Dobbs matters—not because it outlawed abortion (it didn’t), but because it stopped unelected judges from dictating a one-size-fits-all national rule on an issue that Americans are perfectly capable of debating and deciding for themselves.

Barrett’s words will no doubt trigger the usual outrage from the Left, but her clarity underscores why this debate isn’t about culture wars—it’s about whether the people still have the right to govern themselves.