← Not Dead Yet
Not Dead Yet
Amy Coney Barrett
00:53:53
Justice Barrett joins Ben and Chris. Ben shares his status as the founding member of the ACB for SCOTUS club. The three talk about how she writes her opinions, how parenting slows down the train, the importance of civics, and what horse-race political...
Loading summary
Transcript111 lines
- [00:00]
Ben Sasse
Foreign.
- [00:12]
Sasse and I'm Chris Stirewalt.
- [00:14]
Chris Stirewalt
And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
- [00:20]
Ben Sasse
However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to
- [00:24]
Chris Stirewalt
live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.
- [00:31]
Ben Sasse
Okay, Ben Sasse, you have history, you have priors with today's guest. I want to ask you about those things, but let's lay out the as the Jesuits would say, let us descend first into the particular Amy Coney Barrett, a daughter of New Orleans whose father was a corporate lawyer, whose mother was a teacher. She went to Rhodes College in Memphis, a fine school. And then she went on to Notre Dame where she went to law school. It's where she met her husband. Think about it like this, Amy Coney Barrett, associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. When she was 24, she went to work for Lawrence Silberman, who was on the D.C. court of Appeals and one of the leading minds of his time. She's 25. She goes to.
- [01:23]
Chris Stirewalt
Am I right?
- [01:24]
Ben Sasse
Exactly 25. She goes to work as a clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia from when she was 28. She goes into private practice at a big time firm, Baker Bots, one of the big, big, big, big, big ones. Two years later, she goes back to Notre Dame where she teaches and, and teaches and teaches and writes until she's 44. So for 14 years she's at Notre Dame and then she's appointed to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and then three years after that to the Supreme Court, a busy lady who had seven children along the way. So you first met Amy Coney Barrett
- [02:05]
Chris Stirewalt
When I was a founding member of the ACB fan club. You know, on this podcast, we don't do politics hardly at all. And this is not a politics episode, but many people will be confused and think it is. So I'll, I'll use this opportunity to tell a fun Trump joke. President and I, as is kind of well known, had a complicated relationship in 2015. 16. And when he I'm not a lawyer. And when he won, Mitch McConnell called me up, this is middle of November 2016. And he said, hey, I have a fun proposition for you. What about going on the Judiciary Committee? None of us know whether or not Donald Trump believes the stuff he said about the kind of judges he wants to appoint now that helped him win the election, as opposed to the stuff he said a few years ago where the biggest activists Judges in America were his favorite. And Mitch said, why don't you go on the Judiciary Committee? And then if Trump appoints the kind of constitutionalists that he said he's going to, you can champion them, and if he doesn't, you can torpedo them. And so I ended up on the Judiciary Committee as a non lawyer, and so went to school on who all the candidates were for appellate and SCOTUS noms and quickly became a big fan of Amy. And so I met her in that context, and then the President made the great choice to put her on the Circuit Court, and I immediately started lobbying him that he should put her on the Supreme Court such that that one of Donald Trump's very funny habits is he often reduces people to about two things, and whatever they are, you know, that's what comes up every time you talk to him. My three things were, doesn't dress well, wears Nebraska pullover gear on tv. Why don't you. You could be. You could be a senator from central casting. How come you don't wear a double Windsor tie enough? You wear all that Husker pullover crap. You look like a gym rat.
- [03:54]
Ben Sasse
Don't get me started on the haircut. Yeah, go ahead.
- [03:56]
Chris Stirewalt
I. I admit I do have the gym rat's haircut. I mean, I used to have a hairc. Got that. Good. The second thing for me in Trump's, you know, Frontal Ram was super religious guy who's really into his family. Like, I'll take it. I'm a gym rat, don't know how to dress, wear Husker gear, and I'm a religious guy who's into my family. That's all right by me. And then over time, he added that I was a freak obsessed with, quote, that Catholic lady from Notre Dame. So sometimes the President would call me or the White House switch would call, and I'd be on hold, waiting, waiting for the President to come on the line. He was the one calling me, and he would say, are you calling me about that Catholic lady again? So anyway, that's the beginning of my history with Amy is the President became obsessed with the idea that I was obsessed with getting Amy on the court.
- [04:47]
Ben Sasse
So in the 14 years that she was at Notre Dame, the way that she became a hero to people like you, insofar as there are people like you, she became a hero through writing. Right. She had originally considered teaching Shakespeare. She was an English lit major at Rhodes, and that was who she was. So she's a words person who basically wrote herself onto the Supreme Court. It wasn't the practice of law by which she got there. It was writing and thinking about the law. And I take it that's what you dug. Yeah.
- [05:30]
Chris Stirewalt
And her constitutional zealotry, dispositional judiciousness and moderation. But she's clearly a zealot for judges doing what judges should do, which is put on a black robe and swallow their personal preferences and their policy views. We had the funny moment in her confirmation hearing where she'd been testifying for days with notebooks in front of her that she never opened in that famous meme where she was asked by some Dem senator what she was reading off that script and she held up an empty legal pad. I asked her, as just an aside, to set up one of my questions. What are the five freedoms of the First Amendment, which are religion, speech, press, assembly and. And protest or redress of grievances? And the famous, almost omniscient Amy Coney Barrett couldn't remember. We won't bring this up, but she couldn't remember some of the five freedoms. She was really tired.
- [06:26]
Ben Sasse
She was four for five. And she got everything but redress.
- [06:29]
Chris Stirewalt
That's right.
- [06:30]
Ben Sasse
But.
- [06:31]
Chris Stirewalt
So I want to be a gotcha, because I was. I'm in love with her, love of the Constitution.
- [06:36]
Ben Sasse
So I want to talk to her about her writing, and I also want to talk to her about being a person who is famous for their faith as the President. How the President identified her speaks to that. So I want to talk to her about those things, and I want to have a great conversation with a smart person.
- [06:53]
Chris Stirewalt
This is going to be fun. Thanks for doing it.
- [06:55]
Ben Sasse
Let's listen.
- [06:57]
Chris Stirewalt
Justice Barrett, thank you so much for making time with us. We have already introduced you, so we won't slobber all over here, but we are, we are delighted to have you. And I know that normally when someone's at the tail end of a book tour, the kind and charitable way to treat somebody who's selling and exhausted is to say, what's your book about? But we don't tend to do that. We will along the way talk about your book, but I want to just start with a big question about how you can be as prolific and productive and excellent in your writing over all these years and also have seven dependents. I know they're not all at home anymore, but talk work home a little bit for us. And if you would like, parse out your 20s versus 30s versus 40s. And did you learn lessons that change the rhythms of how you could be this productive at work and home.
- [07:50]
Amy Coney Barrett
Oh, my. Gosh so that's, that's a big question. I'll see what I can do to answer it. I know, I know, I know. I'll take up the whole podcast on this one. Let's see. I don't know how productive I always feel, right? I mean, I think one of the things that working parents always say is you're doing a lot of things and none of them completely well. My life has looked different in different stages of my career and different stages of my family life. You know, when people hear that I have seven kids, they say, how do you do the job that you have right now? And the answer is, 10 years ago I couldn't have because my kids were much younger. And so there was a lot more hands on. I mean, now I was about to say we only have four at home, but I guess that still is, you know, substantial in the big scheme of things. Now we have four at home, but they're all teenagers and that makes, that makes a big difference. So I would say it's a lot of teamwork. My husband is right on board. In fact, he's, you know, for the last 10 years probably he's done all of the cooking and the grocery shopping. He manages a lot of the appointments. He also is a lawyer, so that really helps. But you know, Ben, I mean, I don't, I don't think it's any secret that I am a person of faith. That that has been made well known throughout my confirmation processes. And the prayer that I've had for a long time is that the Lord would multiply my time like he multiplied the loaves and the fishes. So maybe that's how it all gets done.
- [09:18]
Chris Stirewalt
I mean, anything that you would tell yourself As a late 20something parent today, if you could go back, anything that you were over obsessed about or wrong about or under investing in that you can see now.
- [09:31]
Amy Coney Barrett
Oh, goodness. So when I was a brand new parent, which was in my late 20s, I, like so many new moms do, was obsessed about what was the right way to raise my child and how often to feed and co, sleep or put in a crib. And none of that stuff really matters. I know I have friends who did the whole wide range of those sorts of baby techniques and the kind of car seat you wind up buying, so long as it's a safe one, is not gonna make or break your child. You know, I was not able to nurse my oldest and I was convinced that I would have ruined her for life because she had to be fed on formula. She's great she's got a productive career and she's doing well in life. So I think I did obsess about a lot of the things that didn't matter. But I do think one thing that Jesse, my husband, and I have always tried to do is put our family life first. It was always more important to me to have children and raise children than to have a career. And my posture was always that I was willing to work away if my kids needed it. And then Jesse would say the same thing. We would go out for these date nights and talk about it, and he'd say, you don't have to be the one to walk away. If we decide someone has to stay home, I'm willing to walk away. But we never walked away because it just kept working.
- [10:49]
Chris Stirewalt
Nice shout out to Jesse.
- [10:51]
Ben Sasse
All right, Jesse, you and Ben Sasse are alike in some ways and therefore very different from me. Your book. I don't want to be a textualist here, but your book is basically divided into, as I see it, two parts. There's the you story, there's the who you are, and then there's this really helpful, useful discussion of originalism and what it is and why. But I want to start with the you part. And the one one place where I know you and Ben Sasse are alike is that you write before you type.
- [11:34]
Amy Coney Barrett
You do that, too, Ben.
- [11:36]
Chris Stirewalt
I index card outline before I start voice to texting, and then I edit later.
- [11:41]
Ben Sasse
Oh, interesting listeners to this podcast have already heard me deride my friend.
- [11:46]
Chris Stirewalt
He hates my index cards. I have him on Amazon automail. I burn through about 500 index card graph paper index cards a week.
- [11:55]
Amy Coney Barrett
Oh, my God.
- [11:55]
Ben Sasse
It's just watching Ben Sasse, right, for me as a journalist just hurts me. It pains me because he's writing and scribbling and writing and stacking cards and moving stuff around, but I can't remember whether it was read you or heard you say this, that writing out in longhand first helps you go through the idea as opposed to editing while you write. And that while if you are typing, and that's what I do, right, I'm always like, ah, that's not exactly what I wanted. That's not exactly what I wanted. Tell me about why you write before
- [12:34]
Amy Coney Barrett
you type for exactly that reason. I mean, you're probably faster and a better editor than I am, Chris. Because if I sit down at the keyboard where you can just select and delete and write over text so easily, I become obsessed with making each sentence perfect rather than actually getting an argument out onto paper. But if I have the legal pad, then I don't feel the pressure. I know it's not the finished product, so I can just brainstorm. I can let it flow. Maybe that's how index cards work for you, Ben. I mean, it's just a way I write out an outline first, but it's a way of keeping me focused on the ideas rather than their expression. Because I can do all of the obsessive editing later, but it just takes me too darn long. If I sit there and try to perfect every sentence before I get out the basis of what I'm going to say.
- [13:24]
Chris Stirewalt
There's the old line. Sorry, morphine brain. The old line that we all know, but that I'm not going to be able to recall. Good speaking makes writing more understandable. This isn't it. And good writing makes speaking more precise. It's clarity versus understandability, accuracy, precision versus understandability. For broader audiences, I think that the trivium, I think in terms of grammar, logic, rhetoric, all the time. What are the building blocks of my argument? How does the argument fit together? And then how would I position that argument for different types of audiences? But that's still mostly a solo task. And so I use speaking engagements as a chance to try out something that I think is 80% done. And it turns out it's only 49% done. When you stand up in front of somebody and you realize, oh, this isn't nearly clear enough. How does having clerks change your writing experience? Like, before, you had a dedicated group of. You get three or four.
- [14:27]
Amy Coney Barrett
I get four.
- [14:29]
Chris Stirewalt
Before, you had those four as a part of your regular life. So when you're on the. A circuit court or when you were a law professor but didn't have dedicated people, how does your writing evolve?
- [14:39]
Amy Coney Barrett
So I did have dedicated people on the circuit court, but I did not have. It was totally just me when I was a law professor. So one thing is that when I was a law professor, I was only ever writing a couple things at a time. And there was not a fast timetable. I mean, you could take several months, you could take a research leave, you could take a summer to work on an idea. And now I'll have a bunch of opinions going on at once. The pace is a lot faster, the writing is a lot faster. So I did it all from start to finish myself, when it was just me. Now what I do is I incorporate speaking and editing. The law clerks, and this is how most judges work, will have law clerks write the first drafts, but I talk it through with them first. I was just on the phone with a law clerk about a memo to write, and I'm just kind of dictating it, as maybe you would have in the 1950s through an assistant. And I kind of talk it through, and I say, okay, put that down on paper. Clean it up. And then she'll send me back a draft of what I talked through, and then I edit that up, and that just goes faster. And I do that with opinions, too, but I. But I do it just kind of more broad brush. I mean, I don't dictate every single sentence, and then they give me back the draft, and then I edit it up, and I'll rewrite a lot of it, but at least it makes it go a little bit faster because I have something to work with.
- [15:58]
Ben Sasse
Okay. Another way that you and Ben Sass are alike is that you both have lived your lives like you were in a hurry. You. You. I know you toyed with the idea of being a literature professor, that you were an English lit major, and came to a fork in the road around law school, but I assume that you've always been a highly motivated, highly organized person your whole life. Is. Is. Is that right? Were you. Were you even as a young person when I was, like, trying to get a new tape deck for my Subaru station wagon, you were thinking about living an intentional, purposeful, rigorous life?
- [16:42]
Amy Coney Barrett
I think my high school teachers would very much beg to differ with that decision of me as a teenager.
- [16:49]
Ben Sasse
Really?
- [16:49]
Amy Coney Barrett
Yeah. I mean, I managed to get good grades in high school, and I was in all honors classes, but I was the student who was doing her math homework under the desk during English because I hadn't done it the night before. I just was, you know, more. More focused on a social life and friends than really buckling down. And I would say that in college, I really did make academics my focus and became much more organized. So in high school, I did very well, but not as well as I would have done if I had really focused on it.
- [17:24]
Ben Sasse
Yeah. Who knows where you could have gone? You could have been a real success in your life if only you had applied yourself in high school. The continuation here.
- [17:33]
Chris Stirewalt
You could have been a mountaineer.
- [17:34]
Ben Sasse
That's right. Who knows? To have seven children, to have one of the most prominent jobs in the country, to maintain a healthy marriage, to do all the stuff that you have to do, you have to segment your day into some very small slices, which is something that my friend Ben does
- [17:59]
Chris Stirewalt
between naps. I've changed a lot.
- [18:01]
Ben Sasse
Yes, well, it took cancer to get you on the same schedule as me, so there's that. But when you think about. You've talked about your great grandmother's house and visiting that space, and I think she had 12 children.
- [18:20]
Amy Coney Barrett
She had 13.
- [18:21]
Ben Sasse
13 children. And thinking about. So just talk a little bit about how you think about organizing your life, the pace of life, and how you get it all done.
- [18:29]
Amy Coney Barrett
Yeah, sometimes I feel like the pace of life is crazy. When our youngest son, Benjamin, who has down syndrome, was born, we were already feeling really overwhelmed. Life was really busy. We were both working. And at that point we had six children, and the youngest four were very closely spaced in part because one of those was our son JP is adopted. So, I mean, it was already crazy. And then we found out after he was born that he had downs. And maybe this is a good way to answer the question. You know, he was in the NICU initially, and we were driving back from the hospital, my mom and I, and I said to her, you know, our life was already a high speed train and I really needed a baby who could just hop on board. And she said, well, then maybe the Lord is telling you that you have to slow your train down. And that did happen with Benjamin because he took more time. There were all these therapy appointments, but I think we grew a lot. We did have to slow the train down in some ways. In some ways, we did just kind of pull him aboard. Sometimes I laugh and I think about that moment that my mom told me that if I could have seen, you know, eight years, I can't remember how many years it was, eight or nine years ahead, that this is what we would be doing. I don't really call this slowing the train down down, but. But it worked. And, you know, actually, Ben, I was thinking of you, and I've just been thinking about you and your podcast and, and praying for you. But at that time, when I was thinking about slowing down with Benjamin and how difficult it was, I saw a man in the law school, I was on the faculty at the time, who had suffered a brain injury. And I asked him how he was doing, and he paraphrased Marcus Aurelius. And he said, the obstacle in the path is the path. And I thought about that a lot. Like with Benjamin, I mean, I think that most of us in life would do anything we could to avoid obstacles. I gave a talk about this once and I said, you know, if ways could tell you how to avoid, you know, metastatic cancer or, you know, having a child that has a difficult diagnosis, we would all avoid it. Right. But that is, I think sometimes to slow down and not focus on the path that you think you're on or where you're hurtling towards and realize that sometimes the obstacles. I mean, I think about the story of the Good Samaritan like that. You think about, you know, the first couple who. The first couple of people who pass him by. You know, you have them passing him by and they see him as the obstacle, and then you have the Samaritan stop and see that he actually was the mission. You know, it was the obstacle in the path. That was the path. So I guess that's, you know, maybe not exactly an answer to your question, Chris, but I think that life is a lot of times a high speed train, but we've had things that arise where I try to realize that it's not always the plan or the path that we're on that is the most important, but maybe stopping to pay attention to the things that are happening along the way.
- [21:34]
Chris Stirewalt
That was some good tough love from your mama too. Talk about how you use your family to raise 7 because you can't do. You and Jesse don't do it all alone, right? Has the migration from South Bend to D.C. changed extended family life? And how's that rhythm work?
- [21:51]
Amy Coney Barrett
Yeah, that has been hard actually, because when we were in South Bend, my mother in law lives in South Bend and many of my husband's aunts and uncles, and then in what was a huge stroke of luck to both Jesse and me, my sister married his best friend and they both lived in South Bend. And so we were with them all the time. And then here I have a cousin to whom I'm very close, but we don't have other extended family, so that actually has been difficult. When we had the kids and they were all young, I mean, my mom came to visit a lot. Both of my parents did. Our nanny was actually Jesse's aunt. So our childcare situation was fantastic. You know, they were left with family each day. I would say that my family growing up and maybe kind of Chris, circling back to the whole great grandmother thing and my large extended family, they have shaped who I am, who I want to be. And I think it is their love and support always around that when things happen, you know, this job has had hard parts. I always feel very knit and very grounded by my brothers and sisters, by my siblings, by my kids, by my husband. It's just a huge support system that I think has helped me be who I am and helped me stay steady.
- [23:14]
Ben Sasse
I got in the time machine and I went back to October of 2020. And I listened to some of your com, some of your testimony at the confirmation hearing. And I listened to then Senator Sasse with one of the best, I think one of the best things he ever said publicly about religious expression and religious liberty. And it was a real good one.
- [23:47]
Religious liberty is the basic idea that how you worship is none of the government's business. Government can wage wars, government can write parking tickets, but government cannot save souls. Government's really important. War is important, Parking tickets are important. But your soul is something that the government can't touch. So whether you worship in a mosque or a synagogue or a church, your faith or your lack of faith is none of the government's business. It's your business and your families and your neighbors and all sorts of places where people break bread together and argue. But it's not about power, it's not about force, it's not about the government. This is the fundamental American belief. Religious liberty is one of those five great freedoms clustered in the first Amendment religion, speech, press, assembly, and protest. These five freedoms that hang together that are the basic pre governmental rights are sort of Civics 101 that we all agree on well before we ever get to anything as relatively inconsequential as tax policy.
- [24:48]
The problem of it is for me to be a person of faith who is serious and sincere about your faith. It's also for me something very personal. Right. When I go interview somebody or I'm doing, I'm being a simple country pundit. I don't want to say now as a Christian, I think x, right. I want to be a journalist who's a Christian, not a Christian journalist. But you were not given that opportunity because your faith, your beliefs, your lifestyle, everything about you was treated as fair game in your confirmation. Right. The dogma lives loudly in you. We heard talk as much as you're comfortable about in how your faith was affected by strengthened or changed or in any way how your own experience as a person of faith was affected by having to go through that very public experience.
- [25:58]
Amy Coney Barrett
It was really, really hard. I think it was hardest in 2017 when I went on the 7th Circuit and was in that confirmation process because that was. The dogma lives loudly on you part. And there were lots of articles, I mean, law professors are not written about in the New York Times. And suddenly my faith is the subject of a New York Times article. I'm being mocked and all of these people are talking about it. I mean, you know, I gather that I didn't see this and wouldn't have known about it if Cinnamon hadn't texted me, like, an outrage on my behalf. But, you know, Saturday Night Live mocked my faith. I mean, so, I mean, what you're supposed to say as a Christian, right, is, well, that humility is good, and you should be willing to do that. But that's not. Well, it certainly wasn't my natural reaction. It was really kind of hard to get through. But, I mean, I wouldn't have done anything different in my life. I wouldn't have done anything differently. My faith is my faith, and I regarded it ultimately as, you know, a way to grow in humility, to be public about my faith. Just, you know, it is who I am. It's true, you know, that I'm a very serious Christian. And so nothing that. Well, lots of things that were said about my faith or about the particulars of my faith were untrue, but the basic fact of the depth of my faith is true. So I regarded it really just as an opportunity to grow in humility and then to witness in the degree that I could. And I will say that I have had people, especially young law students, say things that made me think, okay, well, maybe that was worth it, or why I had one law student say, and this was still when I was on the court of appeals, when I was visiting a law school, that he was grateful for my witness because he didn't know that you could be smart and a person of faith, which, you know, which. Which I guess all three of us on this podcast might take issue with. But he, you know, through his schooling, he'd gone to elite schools all of his life, and he, in fact, was a Christian, but it wasn't the message that he got. So, you know, to the extent that that helped anyone, great, then maybe that was good that came out of it.
- [28:20]
Ben Sasse
Well, let me just have a follow up before Ben takes off here, because he's got. I'm sure he has lots of. Lots of shells in his bandolier on this one, but I don't even know what that means.
- [28:31]
Chris Stirewalt
That I like it.
- [28:32]
Ben Sasse
I feel like you're about to yodel. Makes you Chewbacca, if you. If you must know. But the. I don't have a Jesus fish on my car because I drive really badly because I want to be able to make some rude gestures sometimes and not bring dishonor to the faith by so doing. There's a lot of pressure in being identified with your faith so strongly. Right. Like, I just. It's. It's good pressure in a way that you Feel like you need to live up to the standard. But do you ever feel that?
- [29:14]
Amy Coney Barrett
I feel that as a parent especially, you know, I feel that when I am with my children publicly, I feel like the way that my children behave, the way that I speak to my children, you know, that I have to be this example of really good, if not perfect motherhood all of the time about my faith. I don't know. I mean, I am tempted to make rude gestures when driving once in a while, I guess. And, and I do not have a, you know, a Jesus sticker or a fish sticker on, on the back of my car either, and never have. But yeah, you're right. I mean that, that is, that is, that is a bit of pressure. I guess I do feel it most, you know, in family life.
- [29:58]
Chris Stirewalt
I want to get Scott Immergut to cut in here some Louis, Louis CK jokes about the way we all drive with road rage, but one time I was driving and there was a guy ahead of me and he kind of,
- [30:10]
Ben Sasse
I don't know, he sort of drifted into my lane for a second and
- [30:14]
Chris Stirewalt
this came out of my mouth. I said, worthless piece of. I mean, what an indictment.
- [30:27]
Amy Coney Barrett
What kind of way is that to
- [30:29]
Ben Sasse
feel about another human being?
- [30:32]
Chris Stirewalt
I want to go back a little bit to your writing and particularly to who all the audiences are. So you're, you're writing for your colleagues, you're writing for the rest of the federal bench, I assume, but you're writing a little bit for the public as well. Can you parse how, when you are lead on an opinion, how you think about those different audiences? And then I want to go from there back a little bit to what the, the debate looks like inside the court.
- [30:59]
Amy Coney Barrett
Sure. So when I'm writing an opinion, I mean ideally, and some judges say that they always try to keep in mind a layperson or a member of the public. Sometimes that's really hard to do because law can be really technical. So to the extent I'm writing about something that is accessible to non lawyers, then I will keep that in mind. But largely I have lawyers and law students and my colleagues and other federal judges in mind and then maybe some of the public as well. You know, when you're writing an opinion, you're not writing solely in your own voice because you're speaking, or at least in a majority opinion, you're speaking for the court. So you have to express things in ways that everyone will sign onto. I feel some constraint in the kinds of turns of phrase that I might use in a majority opinion as Opposed to in a separate opinion. I would be dignified in a separate opinion, too. But when you're writing something that's on the part of the. For the court, you just feel like there's maybe pressure to be slightly more formal because you're speaking in a way that will then become precedent in the future. Let's see. So I think that is the audience for that. When I was writing as a law professor, you are really. And I don't know, you've spent a lot of time in academia, Ben. I mean, when you're writing academic work, you're really writing for other academics, you know, and maybe a little bit for law students, too. So it's a much narrower audience, a much narrower kind of writing. One thing I found both fun and challenging about writing my book is that really was aimed more for a lay audience. And in some ways, I found that more challenging because I couldn't start from a baseline assumption that the audience was going to be particularly interested in law and all the other writing I do. People are going to be basically interested in law as a starting point. So it was hard to do that. And frankly, Chris, did some of your questions before. It was kind of hard to weave in the personal, because I don't like being very personal. That was one of the hard parts about the confirmation process. But to make it interesting, I had to weave in some of the personal as well, and that made that kind of writing difficult for me.
- [33:15]
Ben Sasse
Okay, well, I have one more personal question, and I heard that you sometimes bring chia seed pudding to the lunch that the justices have. And I was appalled.
- [33:29]
Amy Coney Barrett
I was like, someone ratted me out. I don't think I've said that publicly.
- [33:35]
Ben Sasse
I was crestfallen to hear that. A person from, of all places, New Orleans, Louisiana, America's greatest food city, the best place. Me and all of the other fat white guys had a meeting. We're like, where do you want to go? And the answer was New Orleans to eat. And you eat chia seed pudding. And I'm very disappointed. Can you redeem yourself by telling me where you would love to go eat in New Orleans? What is your New Orleans like? Oh, yeah. If I was in New Orleans, I'd take you guys to what?
- [34:05]
Amy Coney Barrett
Well, I want to defend myself because I currently have red beans and rice in my refrigerator. Downstairs right now is leftovers. So it's not like I only eat chia seed pudding. I have many, many favorites. One that is both delicious and a favorite in our family. Special to us because we have celebrated many special Occasions. There is Galatoise in the quarter.
- [34:25]
Ben Sasse
Excellent. Oh, this is good. This is good. Oh, you. Pat, you're back. The red beans and rice and Galatoise.
- [34:31]
Amy Coney Barrett
This is good.
- [34:32]
Ben Sasse
But I would definitely want to take you for the Eggs Hussard at Brennan's for breakfast. Is the. Is the one. These are. These are delicious foods, Ben, that people eat. I don't know whether you know about that.
- [34:45]
Chris Stirewalt
I'm 90 days into not eating, but I feel like you and I don't fight much, brother. But on this one, we're about to. Because now you're doing, like, you know, what's the old line? America only has three cities. New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, and everything else is the same, like you're gonna do. I hosted a bachelor party in New Orleans once, but other than that, we kept it. We kept it clean. But I. I don't. I don't know all the restaurants of. Of New Orleans. I don't know how to go from there to. I was about to go to Bob Woodward's book the Brethren, and in the conference, when you're trying to write for five, and you worry that you've fallen to four, I can't redeem it. Once we go foodie, you've got to bail me out.
- [35:24]
Ben Sasse
Eggs Hussard. You've obviously never. Because you would see that we were dealing. We were. That we're dealing in the realm of the ethereal. So you can take that anywhere you want, really.
- [35:34]
Chris Stirewalt
Woodward devoted. A whole chap.
- [35:38]
Amy Coney Barrett
And on Tasty Pudding.
- [35:39]
Ben Sasse
Yes, of course, as a. As a denunciation.
- [35:42]
Chris Stirewalt
So you're gonna have to pull us up, Chris, because I want to talk about the broader reading public. I want to talk about how debates work inside the conference. But you got to get us from food back there, my man.
- [35:53]
Ben Sasse
Well, I mean, originalism for me, and I. What I really liked about your book.
- [36:00]
Chris Stirewalt
Chris always says, my truth, it is so insufferable. Originalism for me.
- [36:05]
Ben Sasse
For me, I. What I loved about your book was. I'm. Ben Sasse is a real historian. I'm a popcorn historian. I write history books. But they're. Whatever. They're. They're things that you give to your dad when you don't know what to get him for Father's Day kinds of books. And to be a real originalist, you have to be a historian. That's. I know that's. That's an obvious thing to everybody else, to both of you. But for me, in reading you, I was like, oh, to be an originalist. If. If we're not just going to play games with words on the page, play lawyers tricks and say, like, well, this could mean that. That could mean anything. I could stretch this out to fit any definition that I wanted. If we're not going to do that, we say, okay, well, then maybe we could do the intent. What was the intent? Well, now I'm going to read the First Congress's minds. I'm going to read the mind. How do you think James Madison felt when he wrote that? And then originalism is. What did people think that it was? And then I thought, well, the implication of that is you'd have to have an awfully good grasp of history. You'd have to have an awfully, awfully good grasp of history and of historical process to try to figure that stuff out. So I want to start with this question because it's the semi quincentennial of these United States in 1776. Do you think that the members of the Continental Congress or Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, did they know the import of what they were writing and saying? I've heard it both ways about the Declaration of Independence, that there was some fancy filigree at the top and it was really the bottom that mattered. And then I've heard, and it was like only belatedly did they realize the import of what they said at the top. How did they think about what they were saying?
- [38:11]
Amy Coney Barrett
Well, let's see. I'm not sure how they thought about what they were saying in the Declaration. And maybe they did think the bottom was more important than the top, but that in some ways I think of the Declaration as a rallying cry and as kind of the idea of America. But the Constitution is really the law. So the Declaration is a backdrop. But it didn't have. They didn't have to be precise. Every word didn't have to have legal significance in the same way that when the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia, then they knew that what they were drafting and the way they expressed it, that really mattered in a different way. So I think they had to think very. They had to think hard and very precisely about how they were going to set up Congress, for example. So I think for that part, they really did for the Declaration, because it wasn't a document that had. It had legal significance in the sense that it was our separation from England, but it didn't have legal significance in that it was not the document that now has binding force in setting up our new country.
- [39:26]
Ben Sasse
Ben Tass, elevated enough for you?
- [39:29]
Chris Stirewalt
That was great. Thanks for. Thanks for nothing. Food isn't important. But let's talk about that idea of America a bit. I mean, it's not passed along in the bloodstream. It needs to be passed along. We haven't been doing much of that for the last 40 to 60 years, depending on how you want to count civic decline, both the, the reception data, what do we know? Barna and Pew and Gallup and others. What do people learn and where are we teaching it? Young Americans need to understand what you're talking about. Where do they start? What could be shared content and curriculum to help recover some of this in common among a broad reading public? Some, some that less than 12% of Americans will read a book this year. And when 40% of the public under age 35 says the First Amendment is dangerous because you might use your freedom of speech to say something that hurts someone else's feelings, people need to understand actually that's precisely what America is. A 330 million person continental nation of people that come from lots and lots of different traditions are going to believe different things about heaven and hell and souls. And we want to distinguish between speech and violence so that we create a community that's free from violence. So speech can matter and you can try to persuade people around your dinner table or your Rotary club and they don't. We don't have that in common right now. Where, where do we start? Not, not Justice Barrett maybe, but neighbor. Mrs. Barrett. Amy, what do you, what do you say as a grass top leader, grass tops leader in America about how we can help the next generation understand more of America again?
- [41:10]
Amy Coney Barrett
Oh my gosh. I mean, amen to everything that you said. I think. And I think our civics education in particular has been really just woeful. So I mean a lot of, let's see. I think a lot of what has to happen to address it is in the curricula of high schools and high school curriculum has to incorporate it. Because I think the reality is once, once people get into college, if they go to college and they're choosing electives, they may or may not opt to take American history or those sorts of classes. And then once you get out and you're working and you're looking for books, I mean, you have to take somebody who's really motivated and a self starter to then say I want to learn something about American government, I want to learn something about our civil society. So I think if we can start in grade schools and high schools, that is the best place and to forming young Americans. Besides which, so much happens on our college campuses. And I think hopefully things might take a turn and be getting better. But I do think intolerance on college campuses is the fruit of students not understanding exactly what you said about the tolerance that's built into the First Amendment. You need freedom of religion because people have different religions or no religion at all. And you need freedom of speech because people have lots of different opinions. So I guess that's where I would start. I think that if someone is really interested in learning about American history and civics, they have a lot of easy ways to do it now. I mean, there are podcasts, there are things that they can do, like while they're driving. I mean, you've written books. I mean, one reason why I wrote my book about the court in a way that would be accessible to an audience is I feel like there's so much misunderstanding about what the court does. And so I wanted to have a way to connect people to that. I mean, my kids, you actually, you know, Ben, the school that my kids go to, I got to go into my daughter's classroom. They were reading the Federalist papers and talk about the Federalist Papers with them because they were, you know, doing American history and they were going deep and they were freshmen. So, you know, I think that's, that's the kind of education that we need for our children. Because you're right, it is not passed down in the bloodstream.
- [43:21]
Chris Stirewalt
So glad you're talking about elementary school and middle school, because at the end of the day, this isn't a college campus problem. We got lots of college campus problems, but this is really a habits problem that if you believe in ensouled humans who can be self restrained, self disciplined, self controlled, so they don't have to be other constrained, other disciplined and other controlled. If you believe in freedom, freedom from and freedom to, there have to be the habits of deliberation that aren't instant, that aren't the gratification of whatever urge I feel at the moment, even if I think my urge is social justice, you have to be. Be slow because you don't get to have all the power yourself. And so it's about the, the inculcation of those habits. So as, as a parent, how do you create the reading culture in your household? Is there a Barrett family canon? And how do you, how do you get your kids addicted to reading deliberation and deferred gratification?
- [44:15]
Amy Coney Barrett
You know, it's funny. We have a couple children who are naturally voracious readers, and both Jesse and I were voracious readers as we were growing up, I used to participate in those library contests where you got to fill out the certificate for how many books you would read over the summer. So for those children, we don't really have to encourage it because they do it on their own. And we make sure that we have available a lot of good books and a lot of wholesome books, and we try to screen out things that we don't want them to read. My oldest daughter will still talk about how when she was in fourth or fifth grade, I found her reading the Hunger Games and then made her come out to several coffees with me so that we could talk about it and talk about the morality, talk about how the ends don't actually justify the means. And then, like in many families, you know, we were a little bit looser with the younger children, and she came one night to find Jesse and I watching the Hunger Games with one of the younger kids.
- [45:15]
Ben Sasse
Oh, Savage.
- [45:16]
Amy Coney Barrett
I said we were discussing the morality of it as we went along. Don't worry, we covered that, too.
- [45:21]
Chris Stirewalt
A lot of pausers, right.
- [45:22]
Amy Coney Barrett
But with the children who were less interested in reading, there was bribery involved, like, you know, a certain amount of money for every book that you read. And that. That was kind of the summertime bribe. But other than that, you know, we've tried to be very careful and intentional about the schools that we've chosen for the kids so that we know also that they will get good reading at school, because what we can't accomplish with the bribe of money, sometimes, you know, the school can accomplish with, hey, that's what your grade depends on.
- [45:54]
Ben Sasse
We're. We're almost out of time. But I do want to ask you just to talk a little bit about loving our neighbors when we don't agree. The idea of the luncheon, the. The home of the infamous chia seed pudding, but that. That you sit down with the other justices of the court after you've had what I assume can be sharp or tense conversations around cases, and that you go sit down together and treat each other like human beings. How would the Supreme Court of the United States be different if they voted remotely? If you all voted remotely, if you could stay in your chambers or stay at home and click a button, write your opinions, click a button, and never have to see each other face to face and never have to, oh, what did you bring today? Or tell me about what you're watching on television or whatever else. How would it be different?
- [46:54]
Amy Coney Barrett
Well, let's see. It's hard to predict. I mean, it was like that during COVID But I only participated in that for the last couple months because everything was remote then. I imagine that it would be a lot sharper. I mean, I think that's what's happened with social media and interpersonal relations generally, because it's a lot easier to say sharp things to someone that you don't have to look in the eye. It's a lot easier to say sharp things to someone that you don't know. And so I think being in person, I think having to talk about cases in person and not just through an exchange of memos or remotely on the phone, you know, I'm going to have to look my colleagues in the eye and for a long time, by the way, because it's, you know, a job with a life, it's a lifetime appointment. And so if I say something that ruptures a relationship or destroys a relationship, it's in your face. You know, you see it, you see it in the hallways, you see it around the conference table. And so I think building interpersonal, I think interpersonal communication, face to face communication, working on relationships, all of those things make disagreements easier because then you're disagreeing with someone for whom you have affection, someone that you know, you know what their kids are up to, you know, what they're reading or watching on tv, and they're a real person and they're not just, just someone who has really frustrated me because they're casting a vote that I really disagree with and they
- [48:19]
Ben Sasse
probably believe the things that they're saying. One of the things we have a sincerity gap problem, which is people disagree with each other and they're not open to the possibility that this is a person of good intention who believes something different from me, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- [48:36]
Amy Coney Barrett
I think that's very, very true.
- [48:38]
Chris Stirewalt
One of the greatest disservices our horse race journalism about politics has done is reducing everything to tribal labels. So I don't know when it started, but I assume it was soon after the Bork hearings that we started to talk about Republican and Democratic justices as opposed to justices who had been nominated by a president of one party or the other and then conferred by a Senate that may have had a majority of one party or the other, but we don't have Republican and Democratic justices. You all wear black robes. And so I think that the, the biggest misconception that the public has about the Court and about justices is that it, and you all are political, give us little glimmers of hope about how the public could have some of its confidence restored in the institution of the court. Obviously, you care a lot about public trust in general, but about your institution, give us, give us some good news that you wish more people understood.
- [49:37]
Amy Coney Barrett
Well, so I don't have the statistics right in front of me, and they vary a little bit between terms, but, I mean, it was only a couple terms ago, but I think there were only six cases of the 50 some odd cases that we decided that year that broke down by party of appointing president. All the other cases were either different configurations or, I mean, and this is generally held true for years. Roughly 50% of the cases are unanimous. And one thing that really drives me crazy in reporting about the court is that big cases tend to be defined as ones that break down by party of the appointing president. You will have cases that at the start of the term, everybody focuses on and says, oh, that's really going to be a big case. But then if it turns out not to. To fill that narrative, all of a sudden, that wasn't really a big case. And people will say, oh, it's in the big cases that the court really. In the cases that really matter, those are the, you know, the six, three splits, at least as the court is currently comprised. And that's just not true. And so, I don't know, another gap in our education, in our educational system, I think is teaching people to think critically and to not just take data or, you know, to look behind, especially right now, while media seems to be very polarized and people are getting all of their news from sources with which they tend to agree. I just think stepping back, I mean, and the narrative about the court is one obviously that is near and dear to my heart, but being a little bit more critical about what you're reading, because really the court's work, if you look at the court's work and if you look at the statistics, it does not paint a very partisan story.
- [51:18]
Ben Sasse
All right, we have to leave it there, but what a pleasure it was to talk to you.
- [51:22]
Chris Stirewalt
Great to see you.
- [51:23]
Amy Coney Barrett
It was great to see you too.
- [51:24]
Ben Sasse
Really, really a delight.
- [51:25]
Chris Stirewalt
I wish we could all get dinner in your hometown. But hello, hello to Jesse and best to your family and thanks for the work you do on the court.
- [51:33]
Amy Coney Barrett
Likewise, and you remain in my prayers.
- [51:35]
Chris Stirewalt
Thank you, friend.
- [51:36]
Amy Coney Barrett
Okay, bye.
- [51:37]
Ben Sasse
Bye. You know, for me to come back to it all, the idea of. And it's a theme that we are going to keep coming back to in this podcast about being a person of faith in public life and, and how to be a Christian or however your cupcake is iced and live that in a conscientious way and still have in the worldly success and how it shapes you. And I thought she was really helpful and useful to me on that because I think that is real important. Okay, we should say that Chris Pratt is our next guest.
- [52:19]
Chris Stirewalt
We're getting it uglier. Chris.
- [52:20]
Ben Sasse
Yes, we're definitely, we're definitely upgrading Chris's the The 2014 Sex Second Sexiest Man Alive, which is a weird. Which is a weird distinction to carry around. Chris Pratt will be our next guest, and I think that'll be a very good conversation. Okay, that is it for this week's episode. We hope you'll like, review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind, and I promise we will get to some of your questions at some point. Write us@sassandstirewaltmail.com this podcast was produced by Scott Immergut with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keeping living the Good life.
- [53:08]
Chris Stirewalt
March Madness Forever.
- [53:33]
Amy Coney Barrett
It.