LARRY ELDER: The Judicial Tyranny Of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
How can you tell if the newest Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is an “activist” judge? She admits it. Worse, she appears to think it is her job, if not her duty, to engage in (left-wing) judicial…
How can you tell if the newest Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is an “activist” judge? She admits it. Worse, she appears to think it is her job, if not her duty, to engage in (left-wing) judicial activism.
In an interview with CBS News, Jackson explained what she hopes to accomplish in her many dissents. “I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues,” she said, “and that’s what I try to do.” She added, “And I’m not afraid to use my voice.” This sounds like a podcaster rather than a judge.
You might be forgiven for thinking judges are supposed to interpret the law as intended by the legislature and apply the law to resolve disputes before the court.
Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, compares the role of a justice to that of an umpire whose job is to call balls and strikes. “Judges,” Roberts said, “are like umpires. They don’t make the rules, they apply them.” As to judges deciding cases based on policy or on “how (they) feel about the issues,” on their weighing in on policy, Roberts said, “I don’t think you want judges deciding cases based on what is good policy … there are legal questions here.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her majority decision that reined in the power of district courts to impose nationwide injunctions, scolded Jackson for departing from this conventional view of the role of a judge. Barrett wrote, “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
Jackson’s judicial philosophy mirrors that of then-Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall who described his judicial philosophy as follows, “You have to do what’s right and let the law catch up.”
About the Founding Fathers, Marshall in 1987 on the nation’s bicentennial wrote: “The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, that we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite ‘The Constitution,’ they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.” Marshall’s history is true. But it is up to Congress, not judges, to correct the defects.