Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has shed her usual judicial restraint to deliver a scathing takedown of President Donald Trump and her fellow justices.
The 55-year-old Biden-appointed judge blasted the Supreme Court’s emergency orders—so-called “shadow docket” rulings—which have allowed Trump to implement his sweeping agenda despite lower court rulings blocking it.
“The court’s stay decisions can, at times, come across as utterly irrational,” Jackson said Monday at Yale Law School, which posted a video of her speech on Tuesday.
“The court has left confusion in its wake,” she continued. “There is a serious concern that the Supreme Court’s modern stay practices are having an enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect.”
Jackson denounced the court’s emergency orders, which have enabled Trump to fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees, slash federal funding for research grants, and enforce his immigration crackdown, as “scratch-paper musings” that can “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office for comment.
Jackson’s remarks come amid escalating tensions within the Supreme Court, as the three liberal justices have increasingly voiced dissent against the six conservative justices.
Liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a rare public apology on Wednesday after taking a swipe at conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh while railing against a shadow docket ruling earlier this month.
Like Jackson, the Obama-appointed Sotomayor has taken aim at the Trump administration’s “unprecedented” number of emergency motions, blaming her conservative colleagues.
The Trump administration has filed 34 emergency applications during the president’s second term, and the Supreme Court has backed Trump in more than 80 percent of the cases. The Biden administration filed just 19 during his entire four-year term.
Conservative justices like Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito have parroted the Trump administration’s claim that the number of emergency applications is driven by an unprecedented number of injunctions blocking the administration’s policies.
But Sotomayor contended during an appearance at the University of Alabama Law School last week that the real culprit was a sudden change in her colleagues’ understanding of the concept of “irreparable harm.”
She said that “until more recent times,” the court considered whether an individual would be irreparably harmed by letting a wrongly decided ruling stand while the losing party appealed.
The conservative justices, however, have shifted that paradigm to focus on “systemic harm,” according to Sotomayor, starting from the presumption that the executive branch will be irreparably harmed if a Trump administration policy is blocked while the appellate process plays out.
Jackson, the court’s newest justice, echoed her colleague’s sentiment on Monday.
“The president of the United States, although he may be … harmed in an abstract way by not doing what he wants to do, he certainly isn’t harmed if what he wants to do is illegal,” she said.
She took aim at Kavanaugh and Alito, saying, “I disagree with some of my colleagues who have made public statements suggesting that the court really has its hands tied, or that this is a function of a lot more of these cases being filed.”
