Ketanji Brown Jackson condemns conservative justices’ pro-Trump orders | Ketanji Brown Jackson
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has launched a sustained attack on his conservative colleagues’ use of emergency orders to benefit the Trump administration, calling the orders “scratch-paper musings” that “may seem forgettable and therefore hollow.”
Jackson, the court’s newest justice, gave a lengthy review of nearly two dozen court decisions handed down last year that allowed Donald Trump to enact controversial policies on immigration, steep federal funding cuts and other issues after lower courts found they were likely unlawful.
These orders, designed to be short-term, have largely allowed the US president to move forward with key parts of his wide-ranging conservative agenda for now.
Jackson spoke for about an hour at Yale Law School on Monday and released a video of the incident on Wednesday.
Last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke of similar emergency orders at an event at the University of Alabama and objected to the approach of conservatives on the bench.
The court’s emergency docket consists of appeals from cases still heard in lower courts; The nation’s highest court is being asked to intervene quickly, and is doing so without hearing oral arguments. The second Trump administration filed 34 emergency petitions, and the court sided with Trump in most cases. reported.
After winning the 2016 election, Trump was able to nominate three justices during his first term in the White House; This tipped the balance, and the conservative justices now ranked sixth on the nine-member panel. By nominating Jackson to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer in 2022, Joe Biden kept the number of justices considered liberal to three.
Jackson has previously criticized emergency orders for dissenting opinions and in an unusual appearance with Judge Brett Kavanaugh last month. But his speech at Yale, addressing the public rather than the other eight justices, was notable.
He referred to the orders, often issued with little or no explanation, as “the back of the envelope, first flushing impressions of the merits of the legal matter.”
What’s worse, Jackson said, is that the court insisted that these “paper scribbles” be applied in other cases by lower courts.
He said the orders had another problem: the failure to acknowledge that real people were involved, making them “appear uninformed and therefore hollow.”
Jackson also rejected the court’s assessment that preventing the president from enforcing his own policy was also a harm that outweighed the harm that could be faced by those who challenged a policy.
“While the president of the United States may be harmed in the abstract, he is certainly not harmed if what he wants to do is illegal,” Jackson said in a question-and-answer session with law school dean Cristina Rodriguez.
He said the court was reluctant to intervene in cases early in the legal process. “There is value in avoiding the court constantly touching the third rung of every divisive policy issue in American life,” Jackson said.
While he said he could not explain the change, “in recent years the high court has taken a decidedly different approach to handling emergency stay applications. It has been noticeably less constrained, particularly in terms of ongoing cases involving controversial issues.”
Jackson, often joined by Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan, has frequently dissented.
Jackson said there were discussions among the justices about emergency orders, but he decided to speak publicly with the goal of being a “catalyst for change.”
Meanwhile, later Wednesday, Sotomayor issued a rare public apology, expressing regret for comments she made about Kavanaugh last week when she criticized him for remarks referring to his family.
“When I recently joined the University of Kansas School of Law, I addressed a disagreement I had with one of my colleagues in a previous case but made inappropriate remarks,” Sotomayor said in her statement, as reported by CNN. “I regret my hurtful comments. I apologized to my colleague.”
Last September, Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in a Supreme Court majority decision that struck down an order banning federal immigration officials from stopping people based solely on their race, language or job, and a decision to stay in favor of another judge’s restraining order that found “roving patrols” of immigration agents made indiscriminate arrests during a summer raid in Los Angeles.
In her speech last week, Sotomayor reportedly took issue with Kavanaugh, who in her view downplayed the ethnicity-based unfairness of ICE stops, saying: “This is coming from a guy whose parents are professionals. And he probably doesn’t really know anyone who works hourly.”
In high court etiquette, it is widely understood that although justices sometimes disagree with each other publicly on matters of law and justice, they do not bring up each other’s families. That’s a sharp contrast to Donald Trump, who in February called his nominees to the court, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, “an embarrassment to their families” after conservative justices joined with liberals in blocking the president’s use of trade tariffs.
Associated Press contributed reporting
