Ketanji Brown Jackson turns independent streak loose on fellow justices
To hear Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tell it, it’s a “perilous moment for our Constitution.”
The Supreme Court’s most junior justice had pointed exchanges with her colleagues on the bench this term, increasingly accusing them of unevenly applying the law — even if it meant standing on her own from the court’s other liberal justices.
Jackson has had an independent streak since President Biden nominated her to the bench in 2022. But the dynamic has intensified this term, especially as litigation over President Trump’s sweeping agenda reached the court.
It climaxed with her final dissent of decision season, when Jackson accused her fellow justices of helping Trump threaten the rule of law at a moment they should be “hunkering down.”
“It is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” Jackson wrote. “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”
Her stark warning came as Trump’s birthright citizenship order split the court on its 6-3 ideological lines, with all three Democratic appointed justices dissenting from the decision to limit nationwide injunctions.
Jackson bounded farther than her two liberal colleagues, writing in a blistering solo critique that said the court was embracing Trump’s apparent request for permission to “engage in unlawful behavior.”
The decision amounts to an “existential threat to the rule of law,” she said.
It wasn’t the first time Jackson’s fellow liberal justices left her out in the cold. She has been writing solo dissents© The Hill
