Not every Supreme Court justice can be Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, even if you clerked for one of them. Amy Coney Barrett did clerk for Scalia, but she doesn’t seem to have his stalwart originalist backbone. Still, she’s no Sandra Day O'Connor, either.

Conservatives have been jilted far too many times with Republican Supreme Court picks. Democrats seem to bat 1.000 on choosing justices who will validate their policy objectives above all other considerations. Republicans, on the other hand, seem to strike out more often than not. There’s O'Connor, of course, but also Anthony Kennedy and David Souter. Ronald Reagan chose the first two — Kennedy after Senate Democrats so personally destroyed Robert Bork that “borking” became a verb for the disgraceful behavior they repeat with every Republican nominee. Other Republican nominees over the preceding decades likewise were not reliable constitutionalists.

Chief Justice John Roberts, too, has frequently disappointed, never more than with his legally contortionist decision upholding ObamaCare in 2012.

So, it’s understandable that some conservatives are ready to dismiss Barrett as another failure, another turncoat — or worse, a “closet Democrat” and “DEI hire.” That’s doubly so when they see The New York Times praise her after all the hateful flack she took from the Left during her confirmation process.

Upon her confirmation in 2020, I called her a triumph for the Constitution. Is that still true?

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s freeze on nearly $2 billion in foreign aid payments from the utterly corrupt USAID, upholding a rebuke from a Biden-appointed district judge, albeit with a request for clarification on its limits. On the one hand, the decision affected money owed for work already completed, and it seems reasonable to require this payment. On the other hand, NGOs are notoriously corrupt, and the government ought to be more responsible with taxpayer money. Besides, doesn’t the president have the authority to run his own branch of government?

Alito sure thinks he does. “Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” he wrote in another blistering dissent. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”

When Barrett and Roberts joined the Court’s left wing against Trump, the knives came out, primarily for Barrett. The ire was provoked in part due to her facial expression when greeting Trump before his speech Tuesday night. Steve Bannon called it the “stink eye” and surmised that she doesn’t respect the president. However, the merits of the ruling are vastly more important than whatever perceptions about her body language.

Dissenting Justices Clarence Thomas, Samual Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh “saw it for what it was: a judicial overreach trampling executive power,” wrote Jack Posobiec. “Barrett’s vote didn’t just defy Trump, who gave her the robe; it propped up a globalist system conservatives have long despised. That’s not a one-off — it’s a pattern.” He insisted that Republicans “stop playing DEI games with judicial picks.”

You can criticize Barrett’s reasoning, but her job isn’t to bow to Trump just because he “gave her the robe.” Too often, however, that level of loyalty is THE guiding principle of Trump’s most vehement supporters. Still, Posobiec is right to criticize some of her other decisions, such as those dealing with January 6, Colorado’s ballot, and free speech, though she also sided with ending Roe v. Wade and Trump’s position in the immunity case.

Conservatives didn’t back Barrett in 2020 because she was a woman. We supported her for her long record of originalism on the bench. She may have made some baffling decisions since joining the Court, but it’s not because she’s suddenly abandoned originalism.

“Yes, in this case I think Barrett got it wrong,” concedes National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke. Yet “there is precisely no evidence that she is motivated by hostility (or obsequiousness) toward Donald Trump or that she’s a coward or a squish, or that she’s ‘evolving’ in office toward a living constitutionalist (read: completely made-up) position.”

Instead, Barrett occasionally irks conservatives because of what Cooke calls her “procedural preferences,” which she follows “rigorously.” In other words, she interprets the law and sometimes reaches a conclusion that doesn’t advance Trump’s every decision. Criticize away, but do so on the merits, not based on the catch-all DEI excuse or because of some perceived sideways glance or due to the PTSD from O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter.

As for Barrett, my advice is simple: If you find yourself disagreeing with Thomas and Alito and siding with Sotomayor and Brown, you might want to fast, pray, and repent. And as for Trump, he could always borrow a play from Joe Biden and simply ignore the Court, though this time because its decision is likely unconstitutional.