Ketanji Brown Jackson Gets Roasted By Her Own Liberal Colleague

Infighting among liberal U.S. Supreme Court justices spilled out into the open this week, with one member chiding another for her dissenting opinion after the court delivered another major win for President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Trump has broad authority to fire thousands of federal workers, paving the way for mass layoffs that will significantly shrink the size of government. Justices did not rule on the merits of the firings but rather whether they must go through the Merit Systems Protections Board, which is designed to insulate federal workers from politically-motivated retribution.

All justices except Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed that President Trump has the authority to see the layoffs through while a suit by the federal workers winds its way through the courts. Her sharp dissent prompted a rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who accused her colleague of ignoring the crux of the case in favor of a political argument.

Jackson wrote that Trump “sharply departed from that settled practice” by implementing the layoffs despite “all the harmful upheaval that edict entails, while the lower courts evaluate its lawfulness.”

With a firm but professional tone, Sotomayor suggested her liberal colleague was actually the one to depart from the settled practice of grounding court decisions in constitutional law.

“I agree with [Jackson] that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates. … Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force ‘consistent with applicable law,’” she wrote in concurring with the majority opinion.

“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law. I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance.”

The embarrassing moment for Jackson comes just a week after she was mocked by conservatives for writing a dissent filled with rudimentary and sophomoric flair, including phrases such as “wait for it” and “full stop.” Liberals allowed Jackson to pen their dissenting opinion in a 6-3 ruling quashing the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, another significant victory for the president.

The internet had a feeding frenzy when Jackson’s dissent in Trump v. CASA came out. One singled out her allegory of an alien who arrives on earth only to ask “What good is the Constitution?”

As the Western Journal noted, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, issued a cold dismissal of Jackson’s objections.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent,” the Trump nominee wrote.

Jackson, she went on, “decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary” in her defense of nationwide injunctions.

Former President Joe Biden appointed Jackson to the court following the retirement of Stephen Breyer. Before her nomination, he pledged to select a black woman to fill the role.