Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been issuing increasingly vitriolic solo dissents directed at the majority on the Supreme Court. The issue is not so much her simplistic and ideologically driven substance, but that she insults her colleagues.
We have covered multiple prior instances:
Her most recent outburst came in the Louisiana redistricting case, where she lashed out after all the other Justices granted a request to expedite entry of judgment in light of the election calendar. She was so over the top that a rebuke was issued from Justice Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. We covered it in Alito Obliterates Jackson’s Dissent: ‘Groundless and Utterly Irresponsible’.
I had a chance to discuss KBJ’s tactics on the Tony Katz show (transcript excerpt, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity):
WAJ:…. There’s only one person who objected to [the Court’s ruling expediting entry of judgment], and that’s Ketanji Brown Jackson. In a scathing dissent in which she basically called the majority names …. hich she’s done many times before. She’s very derisive towards her colleagues. She’s very offensive towards them.She calls them names. It’s really unbecoming a Justice of the Supreme Court to do that. And so, Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas felt the need to write something responding to her. And in it, they basically said, nothing we did is unprincipled, but you are, and it was just a really awkward sort of situation.But the important thing is they felt the need to do that, because they said that” the dissent levels charges that cannot go unanswered.” They’ve ignored her in the past, but she’s just gone so out on the limb and so offensive towards people always questioning their good faith. Not just disagreeing on the merits. That’s one thing. But questioning the good faith of the other justices, she does it all the time. She’s a problem. And the other justices are finally beginning to speak up about it….Katz:… You think there’s something very important to the fact that in this response to Justice Jackson, that it comes from not only Alito, not only from Clarence Thomas, which you could almost describe as the usual suspects But it comes from Neil Gorsuch. Why is that important to you?WAJ:Well, because Gorsuch is somebody who, I don’t know if I would call him a swing vote, but he does go to the side that conservatives don’t like from time to time. Like on the famous employment law decision about whether “sex” [in employment anti-discrimination legislatoin] includes sexual orientation, he was the decisive vote there. So he is somebody who is a little harder to predict. You’re right, Alito and Thomas, they’re great, but they are the usual suspects, okay? And Gorsuch is not. And so the fact that he joined that statement, I think is highly significant. And the fact that none of the other two left-wing Justices, Kagan or Sotomayor joined with KBJ, and that’s becoming a pattern. She’s increasingly writing solo dissents…Sotomayor is as liberal as they come, Kagan is close to that, although she appears sometimes to be more centrist, but they don’t engage in the name calling.KBJ has become the equivalent of a hand grenade that Joe Biden threw into the Supreme Court and she explodes at people. She tries to cause damage. And again, the issue is not that she disagrees with them on the substance, but she attacks their integrity. She attacks their credibility, she attacks their good faith.This is not the sort of sniping you’re used to seeing on the Supreme Court. I don’t think she’s going to be impeached. I disagree with you. There is no way she’s going to be impeached in my estimation. But she’s unfit for the court. I mean, she really is.
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