Barrett is a member of a particularly conservative Christian faith group, People of Praise. Newsweek reported that the group "teaches that husbands should assume authority as the head of the household." (Her parents are also members, and her father was a coordinator of the group's Southern chapters.)

The New York Times reported that People of Praise "grew out of the Catholic charismatic renewal movement that began in the late 1960s and adopted Pentecostal practices such as speaking in tongues, belief in prophecy and divine healing."

If confirmed for the Supreme Court, Barrett would be the sixth Catholic justice. All but Sonia Sotomayor were nominated by Republican presidents. Justice Neil Gorsuch was raised Catholic but now lists himself as Episcopalian. Two other justices — Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan — are Jewish.

Barrett has also received thousands of dollars in honoraria for appearances from the Alliance Defending Freedom, according to a 2017 financial disclosure posted by Fix the Court, a group that seeks to reform the Supreme Court and federal court system, advocating for term limits and cameras in the courtroom.

ADF describes itself as advocating "for religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, freedom of speech, and marriage and family." ADF represented Jack Phillips, who owns Masterpiece Cake shop and declined to bake a cake for a same-sex couple celebrating their marriage.

Barrett reported receiving $4,200 from ADF in the disclosure, which covers 2016 through the first four months of 2017.

Barrett has been critical of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 abortion decision, but in 2016, she suggested that the court most likely would hollow out the decision, leaving the basic right to abortion in place, but allowing states wide latitude to make abortion difficult to obtain.

"I don't think the core case, Roe's core holding that women have a right to an abortion, I don't think that would change," Barrett said in a discussion at Jacksonville University. "But I think the question of whether people can get very late-term abortions, you know, how many restrictions can be put on clinics, I think that will change."

That, however, was before Trump's election and the composition of the court moved more starkly to the right, making the outright reversal of Roe more plausible.

Similarly, the future of Obamacare could be at stake with Barrett's nomination. The court is scheduled to hear a third challenge to the law the week after the election. Twice before the court has upheld much of the law, but that could change now, with a possible Barrett vote pivotal.

Indeed, she criticized Chief Justice John Roberts' reasoning in upholding the Affordable Care Act.

"Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute," Barrett wrote in 2017. "He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power; had he treated the payment as the statute did — as a penalty — he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress's commerce power."

Precedent

In her academic work, Barrett has written dismissively about the doctrine of respecting the Supreme Court's precedents, known as stare decisis.

"I tend to agree with those who say that a justice's duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it," she wrote in a 2013 law review article.

Guns

While on the 7th Circuit, Barrett wrote that the Second Amendment did not necessarily ban people convicted of felonies from owning a gun. She declared a Wisconsin law, barring anyone convicted of a felony even if they aren't convicted of a violent crime, to be unconstitutional.

"[L]egislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous," Barrett wrote in a 37-page dissent.

Her reliance on originalism also came through a few lines later: "In 1791 — and for well more than a century afterward — legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety."

Immigration

Barrett voted to uphold the Trump administration's "public charge" rule, which "adds barriers for immigrants seeking green cards if they rely on public benefits, food stamps or housing vouchers," Courthouse News Service reported.

The 7th Circuit blocked the administration's ability to enforce its interpretation of the public charge rule in Illinois. Barrett wrote in a dissent that the Department of Homeland Security's definition is not "unreasonable," especially considering that "the text of the current statute ... was amended in 1996 to increase the bite of the public charge determination."

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