Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has revealed what is preventing her from a good night’s sleep.
During a Q&A session at the Indianapolis Bar Association on Thursday, moderator and U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson asked Jackson what keeps her up at night.
“I would say the state of our democracy,” Jackson replied. “I am really very interested in getting people to focus and to invest and to pay attention to what is happening in our country and in our government.”
Without elaborating further, Jackson’s comments indicated that recent consequential rulings on executive power have her concerned about the nation’s path.
In recent weeks, Jackson has written her most scathing dissents since her nomination to the court in 2022. Earlier this week, she was the lone dissenter in an 8-1 decision that cleared the way for mass layoffs within the federal bureaucracy.
In her opinion in that case, Jackson warned that the majority would unleash the administration’s “wrecking ball” on the government. Using language more intense than what Supreme Court justices have typically used in dissent—especially when targeted at a majority which included liberal justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor—she wrote that the court’s decision was “hubristic and senseless.”
At times, Jackson’s sharply worded opinions have been met with caustic rebukes of their own.
In Trump v. CASA, a case that limited the ability of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions against the federal government’s policies, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her opinion that Jackson’s dissent was unmoored from “any doctrine whatsoever.”
Jackson was no less pointed in her opinion, which she wrote with “deep disillusionment.” “This court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise,” she wrote.
With an NPR poll released earlier this month finding that 76% of Americans say that democracy is under serious threat, she’s unfortunately not the only one losing sleep.
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