Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s latest opinion pitted her against her fellow liberals on the bench and revealed her to be far less prepared for her weighty role than her peers, according to a legal expert.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said Jackson’s dissent in a Wednesday court opinion showed her as unserious and unfit for the role of Supreme Court justice.
“What it tells me is that Brown Jackson is really at the far end of the spectrum and that the other justices are getting tired of her,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Wire.
Jackson was the lone dissenter in a court opinion that cleared the way for the Trump administration to begin crafting plans to downsize the federal workforce. The junior justice wrote that the majority opinion is “not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, another liberal on the high court, wrote a concurrence siding with the majority
“I agree with Justice Jackson that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” wrote Sotomayor. “Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force ‘consistent with applicable law’ … and the resulting joint memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management reiterates as much.”
The court opinion and the split on the bench suggests that Jackson is ill-equipped to handle the intellectual rigors of the Supreme Court, according to von Spakovsky.
“This case was eight-to-one. Even justices Sotomayor and [Elena] Kagan joined with the majority because they didn’t want a dissent in this particular case,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Wire. “Only the lone dissenter, Brown Jackson, was once again, you know, engaging in an emotional tirade about the idea that — horror, shock — federal employees might actually lose their jobs.”
Jackson has been singled out in other cases as well. In a court decision last month over “birthright citizenship,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that Jackson’s dissenting argument was vacuous, or at least not motivated by any serious legal theory.
“The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain, like the Judiciary Act of 1789 and our cases on equity,” wrote Barrett. “JUSTICE JACKSON, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever. Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a ‘mind-numbingly technical query … she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.”
“I disagree often with what Justice Kagan and Sotomayor put in their decisions, but they at least try to have a legal basis for what they’re saying,” von Spakovsky said.
Jackson claims Trump’s plans to downsize the federal government is “needless” and “there’s no need for getting rid of federal employees,” von Spakovsky added. “That’s a policy decision. That’s got nothing to do with the law. That’s got nothing to do with the constitutional authority of the president to run the executive branch.”
“I think it’s just another sign that, frankly, she was a big mistake getting put on the court, and that she just doesn’t have the legal acumen to be on the court,” von Spakovsky said. “Sotomayor, Kagan, they do, even though I think they’re often wrong, but I don’t think [Jackson] does.”
