Jackson Stands Alone: Is Liberal Support For Justice Waning After Trump Ruling?

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter in a key Supreme Court decision favoring President Trump, prompting questions about a growing rift with her liberal colleagues.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appears to be increasingly isolated among her colleagues, including her fellow liberal justices, following a recent decision that handed a legal victory to President Donald Trump.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observed on Wednesday that Justice Jackson was the sole dissenter in an 8-1 ruling that allows Trump to proceed with plans to potentially reduce the federal workforce.

The case centered on a lower court’s injunction that had blocked Trump’s executive order directing agencies to prepare for “large-scale reductions” of staff. The Supreme Court’s majority lifted that injunction, with Justice Jackson being the only justice to side with the lower court’s block.

In her lone dissent, Justice Jackson lambasted the majority’s decision as “hubristic and senseless,” criticizing the Court for “releasing the president’s wrecking ball” on the federal bureaucracy. She argued that the Court was prematurely intervening in the litigation.

However, Turley highlighted a significant development: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, often considered reliably liberal votes, did not join Jackson’s dissent in this case. Justice Sotomayor, who concurred with the majority, penned a separate opinion noting that Trump’s executive order merely directed agencies to plan for downsizing, a move she deemed “consistent with applicable law.” This stands in stark contrast to Jackson’s strong objection.

The Supreme Court has no army or police force to enforce its decrees and must rely almost entirely on a carefully built consensus that its rulings will be respected and enforced by others. Only in rare and limited instances may a court enforce its will by the power of contempt.

That consensus is not just carefully built, it has been painfully built over centuries going back into English constitutional history. The court, aware of its dependence on general acquiescence of its authority by others, is careful to conduct itself and operate within a normative culture, a a set of assumptions about the manner and extent of the court's decision-making role.

The prerequisite of this culture is an assumption of the legitimacy of the court as an institution that decides the constitutionality of cases according to a commonly understood set of norms. These norms, as noted, are the products of centuries of small accretions, each one, presumably, acting with in the scope of then existing norms. Break away from this culture, defy the norms, and the court loses legitimacy and the power to enforce its decisions. Thus, the American system would lose its present capacity to decide the constitutionality of vital matters with consequences that no one can predict. Ultimately, the rule of law would be lost and a Hobbesian world result.

Yet the Supreme Court is a place for argument, for disputation, for the assertion of conflicting ideas about how we shall govern ourselves. In that environment it is natural, even inevitable, that Independent Justices will differ on the meaning of the Constitution. But up until now virtually every Justices accepts the idea of the primacy of the Constitution and the normative system under which they operate. Except Justice Jackson.

It is not so much that she is stupid, although she demonstrates that with virtually every opinion, the problem is she does not accept either the primacy of the Constitution or the norms of its interpretation. She rejects Chief Justice Marshall's declaration, "it is a Constitution we are expounding."

Rather Justice Jackson is the product of a cult that has a whole different worldview that grounds its decisions on the principles of the cult. She is utterly indifferent, even hostile, to the provisions of the Constitution or the body of law nurtured over centuries that expounds it. Rather, she reasons within the closed-loop of a cult that is the toxic admixture of academic Marxism and African-American Street resentments and unquenched thirst for entitlements.

A close analogy is the closed-loop Sharia system that is virtually impervious to logic or even science. It rules on temporal matters entirely without reference to the Constitution, laws or Western norms. It has its own constitution, its own culture, its own norms and its own rule of law.

To appeal with reason or precedent to an Islamist of the Sharia cult is a waste of breath. Neither that cultist nor Justice Jackson is open to overtures of logic or constitutional precedent. They pursue their own goals in a different universe.

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