Justice Barrett: Commentary on SCOTUS Opinions and Statutory Interpretation

Suppose a Bond villain (or Dr. Evil) demanded $1 million unless you read every word of a SCOTUS majority opinion. And just to make it interesting, he required you to choose from one of two opinions, each of which involves elections. The first opinion considers a statutory question: do mail-in votes need to be received on election day? The second seems more grandiose: can the federal government protect citizens from political actors who would dilute their votes? (Chief Justice Earl Warren called the second the most vital decision during his time on the court.)Which do you choose? Be careful, because you’d probably choose the more dreadful option.It’s all about the verbs.The first opinion, Watson v. Republican National Committee, opens with a yarn about election laws and elections in the early United States, including absentee ballots for Civil War soldiers. Justice Amy Coney Barrett spins this yarn by choosing great verbs.The second – Baker v. Carr – not so much. Even when protecting voting rights, Justice William Brennan, its author, drains verbs of all their life by adding suffixes and turning them into nouns. Dive into the opinion and you’ll question whether you’d rather stop reading and just pay the million bucks instead.So how does Barrett do it? Like the chief in Learning Resources v. Trump, she often builds her sentences around a character as the subject and gives them a great verb to perform. Thus, we read, “Congress may ‘override’” most of a state’s choices on electio