Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tore into her Supreme Court colleagues for repeatedly clearing the way for Trump administration policies through rushed emergency orders.
Jackson made the remarks during an annual civil rights and civil liberties lecture at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported Thursday.
The justice warned the audience there was “a serious concern” that the court’s handling of emergency requests was “having an enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect” on the federal judiciary, according to The Times.
“We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we are consistently green-lighting harmful acts that do real damage to litigating plaintiffs,” Jackson said, according to The Post.
She pointed to recent emergency rulings that let the Trump administration shrink the Education Department, cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and allow immigration agents to weigh race and language when making stops, The Post reported. She also acknowledged cases the Trump administration lost, including the court’s blocking of a National Guard deployment to Chicago and of Trump’s mail-in ballot restrictions.
Jackson argued that the court too often steps in before lower courts have finished their work, and that litigants with enough clout can jump the line.
“If we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively,” she said, according to The Times. “Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the court’s attention?”
She contrasted the current court with its predecessors, who she said “understood that very little good comes from taking an institution that is supposed to be operating outside of the political realm and routinely steering it into the fray.”
The present court, she said, “has been noticeably less restrained, especially with respect to pending cases that involve controversial matters.”
Jackson gave some credit to her colleagues for beginning to explain their emergency decisions in more detail. She called it “a good and positive development,” though she said it was “still not the full kind of explanation” the court provides on its regular docket.
The Times reported that her speech came roughly two hours after she fielded the administration’s latest emergency application, which asks the Supreme Court to let the Trump administration keep rapidly deporting immigrants to countries other than their own. Jackson did not address that case directly.
As she spoke, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh had been invited to the White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to The Times.
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