Two leading conservative legal thinkers who took not-so-conservative positions on court packing and election recusals stemming from the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett triggered strong reactions across the political spectrum Monday.

In an op-ed article, Harvard Law School’s Charles Fried, former solicitor general in the Reagan administration, sided with Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden’s wait-and-see approach to the “court packing” proposal, which would call for enlargement of the high court, in a New York Times article. In that piece, Fried criticized the current Supreme Court as a “reactionary, not conservative” court.