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Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Telling the Truth About the Supreme Court - Jay Willis @ Balls and Strikes
Balls and StrikesEarlier this week, the Supreme Court issued a two-paragraph order that allows the Trump administration to move forward with gutting some two dozen federal agencies, moving ever closer to realizing the conservative movement’s demented fever dream of making the government small enough to drown in a bathtub. The only justice who noted their dissent was Ketanji Brown Jackson, who over the course of 15 pages came as close as a Supreme Court justice will ever get to characterizing their colleagues as breathtakingly full of shit.
In her opinion, Jackson excoriated the Court’s “hubristic,” “reckless,” and “senseless” choice to “swoop in” and “casually discard” a lower court order that paused Trump’s layoffs while legal challenges proceed, and for “cavalierly concluding (in just one line)” that he has the better argument. She ticks through the “enormous real-world consequences” of releasing this “wrecking ball” on the civil service, which will leave normal people “paying the price.” And she offers a hypothesis to explain why the conservative supermajority voted as it did: The lower court’s order, Jackson wrote, was “no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.” This translates roughly from legalese as “You guys are once again doing whatever Mister Trump asks.”
I do not mean to reduce Jackson’s opinion to its most frustrated snippets; her analysis of previous presidents’ effort to work with Congress to reorganize the executive branch, for example, neatly exposes the conservatives’ willingness to set aside “history and tradition” when it yields answers they do not like. But Jackson’s focus on the Court’s penchant for warping the law to suit Trump’s interests—sometimes using language so pointed that even the other liberals are reluctant to join her—has been the defining characteristic of her jurisprudence since Trump took office. For as long as she remains stuck in the minority, it might also be the most important part of her job: If she cannot persuade her colleagues that the Constitution does not imbue Donald Trump with an inviolate right to ignore it, she can at least use her platform to show the public that the institution is captured, broken, and not to be taken seriously.
The Court has given Jackson plenty of opportunities to make her case. When it granted “Department of Government Efficiency” employees access to sensitive Social Security Administration data in SSA v. AFSCME, she wrote that the Court had transformed “what would be an extraordinary request for everyone else” into “nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this Administration.” When it allowed Trump to revoke the legal status of a half-million noncitizens in Noem v. Doe, Jackson rattled off cases in which the Court had blocked analogous assertions of executive power by President Joe Biden. “Somehow, the Court has now apparently determined that the equity balance weighs in the Government’s favor,” she wrote.
In her opinion, Jackson excoriated the Court’s “hubristic,” “reckless,” and “senseless” choice to “swoop in” and “casually discard” a lower court order that paused Trump’s layoffs while legal challenges proceed, and for “cavalierly concluding (in just one line)” that he has the better argument. She ticks through the “enormous real-world consequences” of releasing this “wrecking ball” on the civil service, which will leave normal people “paying the price.” And she offers a hypothesis to explain why the conservative supermajority voted as it did: The lower court’s order, Jackson wrote, was “no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.” This translates roughly from legalese as “You guys are once again doing whatever Mister Trump asks.”
I do not mean to reduce Jackson’s opinion to its most frustrated snippets; her analysis of previous presidents’ effort to work with Congress to reorganize the executive branch, for example, neatly exposes the conservatives’ willingness to set aside “history and tradition” when it yields answers they do not like. But Jackson’s focus on the Court’s penchant for warping the law to suit Trump’s interests—sometimes using language so pointed that even the other liberals are reluctant to join her—has been the defining characteristic of her jurisprudence since Trump took office. For as long as she remains stuck in the minority, it might also be the most important part of her job: If she cannot persuade her colleagues that the Constitution does not imbue Donald Trump with an inviolate right to ignore it, she can at least use her platform to show the public that the institution is captured, broken, and not to be taken seriously.
The Court has given Jackson plenty of opportunities to make her case. When it granted “Department of Government Efficiency” employees access to sensitive Social Security Administration data in SSA v. AFSCME, she wrote that the Court had transformed “what would be an extraordinary request for everyone else” into “nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this Administration.” When it allowed Trump to revoke the legal status of a half-million noncitizens in Noem v. Doe, Jackson rattled off cases in which the Court had blocked analogous assertions of executive power by President Joe Biden. “Somehow, the Court has now apparently determined that the equity balance weighs in the Government’s favor,” she wrote.
I think Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissents are an important exception to the "Supreme Court dissents don't matter" rule of thumb, because she is using them not to argue with the conservative justices, but to explain to the public that the conservative justices are liars and in the tank for Trump
— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2025-07-10T18:39:07.076Z
Jackson understands what Sotomayor and Kagan haven't fully grasped yet: that when the Court is controlled by a six-justice conservative supermajority, "moderating your language" just conveys the impression that you don't actually care all that much about losing ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/ketan...
— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2025-07-10T18:45:54.348Z
I think Jackson understands her audience, and is writing to assure normal people that, no, you do not have to take a GOP-controlled Court protecting a GOP president seriously. This is grim, thankless work, but it's also the most important part of her job right now ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/ketan...
— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2025-07-10T18:48:10.511Z
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