George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on Wednesday that Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is currently losing the support of her fellow liberal justices following another legal victory for President Donald Trump.
Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole justice to dissent in a decision that allows Trump to move forward with his plans to reduce the federal workforce, calling the majority’s decision “hubristic and senseless.” The majority ruled in an 8-1 decision to lift a lower court’s injunction that blocked Trump’s executive order directing agencies to prepare “large-scale reductions” of staff.
Turley said that Jackson could not even get Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to sign onto her dissent in this particular case.
“It’s particularly interesting from [Jackson]. It’s not long ago that Justice Barrett went after Justice Jackson for what she described as basically an imperial judiciary,” Turley said. “And on this occasion, Jackson is alone. She couldn’t even get Justice Sotomayor to sign onto this dissent. Keep in mind, what Sotomayor noted in her concurrence is that this order was simply having agencies plan for downsizing and she said we can hardly stop that. Well, yeah, Jackson believes you can and this is part of a signature of what’s becoming some sort of a judicial abandon that Jackson has towards the power of these courts.”
“We’ve seen this interesting progression in these injunction cases. In an earlier case, Justices Sotomayor and Jackson lost Justice Kagan who would not sign on. Now Jackson has lost Justice Sotomayor and she is the sole dissenter,” Turley added.
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Jackson issued a scathing dissent where she criticized the majority for supposedly “releasing the president’s wrecking ball” to the federal bureaucracy.
“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.”
Sotomayor, who ruled alongside the majority, wrote in a concurring opinion that the executive order signed by Trump only directed agencies to make plans to reduce the size of the workforce, which she said is “consistent with applicable law.”
Jackson has entered a rift with her fellow justices as she has become increasingly critical of the high court in her dissenting decisions. The Biden-appointed justice issued a blistering dissent in the case Trump v. CASA, which limited district courts’ uses of nationwide injunctions, where she wrote that the decision is an “existential threat to the rule of law.”
Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that Jackson’s argument was “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent” and “the Constitution itself.”
“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,” Barrett wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
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