On Sept. 12, 2021, Justice Amy Coney Barrett assured an audience at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center — named for the Senate majority leader who both introduced her that night and secured her place on the Supreme Court a year earlier — that “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” The court had just green-lit Texas’s Roe v. Wade workaround and blocked President Joe Biden from reversing a Trump-era immigration policy.