CNN
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Two trends have emerged at the Supreme Court in recent weeks: President Donald Trump is on a winning streak and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s junior-most justice, is having none of it.
That dynamic was on full display yet again Tuesday as the court handed down a significant – if temporary – decision allowing the White House to move forward with plans to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. Jackson penned a solo dissent and the justice, who recently took up boxing as a way to relieve stress off the bench, pulled no punches.
“For some reason, this court sees fit to step in now and release the president’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation,” Jackson wrote. “In my view, this decision is not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless.”
Jackson’s dissent was the latest striking rebuke of a court she has served on since 2022, when President Joe Biden named her to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer. Her predecessor, for whom she once clerked, had developed a reputation during nearly 28 years on the court of attempting to reach common ground with the conservative bloc.
But in both oral arguments and increasingly in her dissents, Jackson – at 54, one of the youngest justices – has stood out as a jurist who is unafraid to speak clearly about her concerns, dispensing with the kind of opaque prose that sometimes permeates legal writing.
And on Tuesday, it seemed clear, Jackson was concerned most of all with how the court is handling Trump.
“Today, the court exercises neither caution nor scrutiny, especially compared to the reasoned decisions issued by the courts below,” Jackson wrote. “With scant justification, the majority permits the immediate and potentially devastating aggrandizement of one branch (the executive) at the expense of another (Congress), and once again leaves the people paying the price for its reckless emergency-docket determinations.”
The latest case involved Trump’s plan to reduce the federal government’s footprint, an issue the president campaigned on last year. Several unions sued the administration, arguing the reductions effectively usurped the power of Congress to create the government departments at issue in the first place.
In a terse, unsigned two-paragraph order, a majority of justices said that the only administration action at issue was an executive order and a memorandum from the White House. Because no specific reduction plans were at issue in the case, the majority reasoned, lower courts had jumped the gun by putting Trump’s plans on hold.
“We express no view on the legality of any agency” reduction or reorganization plan, the court wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the senior liberal, agreed with the decision. While she nodded to Jackson’s concerns about restructuring “federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” she pointed out that the White House had required agencies to carry out the reductions in a way that is “consistent with applicable law.”
Whether or not they do so, Sotomayor suggested, is a question for a future case.
Justice Elena Kagan, another member of the court’s liberal wing, was silent.
Jackson, a former US District Court judge whom Biden elevated to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals before nominating her to the Supreme Court, has emerged as one of the court’s most prolific justices. She wrote 24 opinions – majority, concurring and dissenting – in the term that ended last month.
That made her the second-most productive writer behind only conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote 29, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog.
Some of those writings have drawn nearly as much attention as the court’s majority opinions.
Jackson wrote a scathing dissent in the court’s blockbuster decision last month that curbed the power of lower courts to issue temporary orders blocking the president’s policy. That case, which dealt with Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship through an executive order, is still being hashed out by lower courts.
“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,” Jackson wrote in dissent. “But this court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”
Jackson registered her dissent with “deep disillusionment.”
The charge prompted Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative who wrote the majority opinion, to spend a considerable amount of ink pushing back. Even on a court where tensions have flared since the shocking leak of a draft opinion in 2022 in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, the back-and-forth between Barrett and Jackson was remarkable.
“The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain, like the Judiciary Act of 1789 and our cases on equity,” Barrett wrote, referring to a dissent written by Sotomayor. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”
Days earlier, dissenting from a decision that sided with fuel producers, Jackson wrote that court’s opinion left the impression that “moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens.”
And in a case dealing with whether Planned Parenthood and one of its patients could sue South Carolina over its decision to pull the organization’s Medicaid funding, Jackson got into a sharp exchange with Thomas over the meaning of a Reconstruction-era law that allows people to sue the government in federal court for potential violations of their civil rights.
Jackson said that the majority, which barred Planned Parenthood’s suit, was weakening “the landmark civil rights protections that Congress enacted during the Reconstruction Era” and said the court’s ruling “is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.”
“At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,” she wrote. “And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians — and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country — of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.’”
