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One Supreme Court Justice Embarrassed By Rest Of The Court

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[Fred Schilling, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]
Walt RasingerBy
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On the final day of a high-stakes term, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a sweeping decision that limits the power of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions—effectively handing President Donald Trump a procedural victory in his ongoing push to narrow the scope of birthright citizenship. But beyond the 6-3 ruling’s legal implications, it was the blistering exchange between Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson that stole the spotlight.

It’s clear that her colleagues on the Court have grown tired of her being a poor jurist who constantly makes poor moral or political arguments rather than legal ones—to the point where it seems like she doesn’t really understand the law.

At issue was a challenge to Trump’s January 20 executive order, which aims to reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to those born on U.S. soil. While three lower courts swiftly blocked the order as likely unconstitutional, the high court sidestepped the substance of the policy and instead narrowed its review to whether those courts had overstepped their authority with universal injunctions.

Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, warned that the majority’s decision erodes judicial checks on executive authority, suggesting it could accelerate the decline of constitutional norms. She dismissed debates over 18th-century judicial statutes as academic detours and urged the Court to confront what she portrayed as an unbound executive. Her dissent crescendoed with stark predictions about democratic backsliding—language Barrett condemned as “untethered” and “rhetorically extravagant.”

The tension between the justices was as unmistakable as it was rare. Barrett took the unusual step of openly questioning Jackson’s reasoning, accusing her of elevating hypothetical fears over disciplined legal inquiry, wrote The New York Post.

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett stunned veteran bench watchers Friday with a blunt takedown of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “extreme” dissent in the landmark birthright citizenship case in which the Supreme Court curtailed lower court use of universal injunctions.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” wrote Barrett, the court’s second-newest justice, in a jaw-dropping rebuke of her colleague, the newest justice.

“We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Barrett’s response in her opinion was almost mocking: “Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring ‘legalese,’ [Jackson] seeks to answer ‘a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?’

“In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: ‘[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law,’” Barrett continued.

“That goes for judges too.”

Justice Sotomayor, in a separate dissent, offered a more measured critique, grounding her argument in historical precedent. While she opposed the majority’s logic, she remained within the conventional bounds of legal discourse—prompting Barrett to note, somewhat begrudgingly, that Sotomayor at least stayed on “conventional legal terrain.”

Observers quickly took note of the fissures on the court that had some questioning if Jackson is just not up to the task of being a member of the highest court.

 

Though the ruling does not settle the legal fate of birthright citizenship itself, it decisively reins in one of the judiciary’s most potent tools. With lower courts now constrained from issuing sweeping nationwide blocks, the balance of power may tilt further toward the executive—at least for now.

This wasn’t the only case where Jackson’s colleagues seemed tired of her poor reasoning. In a recent Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic decision, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling against mandating state funding for abortion providers like Planned Parenthood exposed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s struggles to keep pace with her colleagues. Jackson’s dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, leaned heavily on emotional rhetoric, accusing the majority of undermining civil rights laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1871, noted The Daily Caller.

The majority opinion of the court did not take kindly to Jackson’s remarks. They did express their displeasure more gracefully.

The majority notes, perhaps for Jackson’s benefit, that they “have explained at length” the legal rationale undergirding their decision. “We reach the unsurprising conclusion that it generally belongs to the federal government to supervise compliance with its own spending programs.” If you read closely, you can see Justice Neil Gorsuch’s eyes rolling back into his head.

Jackson’s argument, and Planned Parenthood’s, “stumbles out of the gate” and “suffers from a number of problems,” according to the majority opinion of the court.

“Instead of grappling meaningfully with the test our precedents provide, the dissent proposes to rewrite it,” the opinion continues. “Our precedents do not authorize anything like the dissent’s approach—and for good reasons,” they further argue. “The dissent’s test would risk obliterating the longstanding line between mere benefits and enforceable rights.”

“To be sure, the dissent assures us that other Medicaid provisions are distinguishable from this one … How? Not based on their text (which the dissent never addresses) but, it seems, based on an unspoken judicial intuition that the provision before us is just more important than others,” the opinion observes. Jackson’s “unspoken judicial intuition” is responsible for many of her dissents. Look no further than her objection to “textualism” (i.e., “faithfully reading the Constitution”).

Liberals online were left shaking their head at Jackson’s failures.

Many have noted that Biden seemed to only pick Jackson because of her gender and racial identity. In 2022, Biden promised not to pick the best justice and announced that he’d pick an African American woman because it was “long overdue.”

[Read More: Michelle Obama Seems To Be Losing It]

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