Ketanji Fatigue | The American Spectator

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a number of significant decisions and opinions last week, ranging from landmark rulings on universal injunctions and supporting age-verification mandates for pornography websites to allowing states to defund abortion giants and letting parents opt their children out of LGBT-themed classroom lessons. One of the most significant decisions, though, had little to do with actually interpreting the law and much more to do with lambasting the most junior Justice’s interpretation of the law.

In the case Trump v. Casa, Obama-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion, arguing against the majority’s holding that universal injunctions have no constitutional basis. Writing for the majority, Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett carefully dismantled and responded to Sotomayor’s dissent, placing the dissenting Justice’s arguments on a par with the arguments made in the case before the Court earlier this year and addressing all three (Sotomayor’s, the Trump administration’s, and the plaintiffs’) all together.

Barrett also addressed a dissent penned by Biden-appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson, but her treatment of that second dissent was far briefer, and Jackson’s arguments were noticeably not placed on a par with anything. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barret bluntly wrote. “Observing the limits on judicial authority — including, as relevant here, the boundaries of the Judiciary Act of 1789 — is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law. Justice Jackson skips over that part,” wrote Barret, in her curt response to Jackson’s argument. She continued:

Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese” … [Jackson] seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” … In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” … That goes for judges too.

It is exceedingly rare for a sitting Supreme Court to so thoroughly eviscerate another member of the Court in so public a forum, and rarer still for five other Justices to sign their names to it. Perhaps it’s not a shock — in fact, it’s almost to be expected — that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would greenlight Barret’s dismissive, two-paragraph castigation, but it is something of a shock that Chief Justice John Roberts, so perpetually preoccupied with consensus and the unity of the Court, would put his name on Barrett’s opinion without qualification.

The most surprising aspect of the majority’s agreed-upon shaming of Jackson’s “legal reasoning,” if such it can be called, is that it took so long to publish something of the sort. While campaigning for the White House in 2020, Joe Biden promised to nominate a “black woman” to any potential Supreme Court vacancy, should he win the election, thus denoting Jackson as an obvious DEI hire when she was nominated to the Court in 2022.

Little surprise then that in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the companion case to the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College decision that struck down affirmative action, Jackson blatantly defended affirmative action.

Jackson’s judicial tenure, from the district court-level to the Supreme Court, has been distinguished by much sharing of her own opinion, in addition to tendencies which have earned the online moniker of “theater kid” behavior. Numerous reports and analyses have found that Jackson is the most talkative member of the Court. During the Supreme Court’s 2022-2023 term, Jackson spoke a staggering 78,800 words during oral arguments; the next-wordiest Justice was Sotomayor, at just over 50,000 words spoken, trailing nearly 30,000 words behind Jackson. During the 2023-2024 term, Jackson was once again the Justice who spoke the most.

According to a SCOTUSblog analysis, Jackson does not use oral arguments to ask questions but to advance arguments herself and “make substantive points about the case being argued.” Despite her abnormally high word count, Jackson actually speaks less frequently than many of her colleagues on the Court; in other words, while other Justices take turns asking questions and follow-up questions, Jackson launches into monologues and tirades. Even Sotomayor, previously considered the most progressive and activist member of the Court, told Jackson to shut up in a case earlier this year. When Jackson repeatedly interrupted an attorney who was trying to answer her questions, Sotomayor snapped, “Just let him finish.”

Jackson also has a flair for high school-style theatrics and what she must consider to be humor. In a 2019 case centered on President Donald Trump’s White House Counsel Don McGahn refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena, Jackson, then serving on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote, “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”

In her dissent against last week’s Trump v. CASA ruling, Jackson wrote (and I wish I were making this up), “[T]o the majority, the power-hungry actors are . . . (wait for it) . . . the district courts.” The only time that the “wait for it” line was ever even remotely funny was the first time that it was said by Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother — and even then, it was chuckle-worthy at best.

In further evidence substantiating the “theater kid” allegations, Jackson appeared in a Broadway performance earlier this year. No, not a beloved classic like The Phantom of the Opera or Les Misérables, but a feminist reimagining of Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet does not commit suicide, but instead discovers that Romeo was bisexual and thus embarks on her own journey full of feminism, LGBT content, and non-binary allies.

Despite having already rapidly advanced through the federal judiciary to a seat on the Supreme Court, Jackson cried out onstage, “I did it! I made it to Broadway!” She has also been known to sing selections from musicals while doing book tours. In her 2024 memoir, Jackson wrote that when she applied to Harvard University, she told admissions officials that “I wished to attend Harvard as I believed it might help me ‘to fulfill my fantasy of becoming the first Black, female Supreme Court justice to appear on a Broadway stage.’”

We have all encountered someone like Jackson — whether a coworker, a classmate, a family member, or just someone at the periphery of our social circle — someone obliviously pretentious, someone who invariably makes herself the center of attention, someone who thinks she’s brilliant but has neither the sense nor the grace to recognize when she’s in the presence of genius, someone who mistakes strongly-held opinion for irrefutable logic. Except perhaps in the case of the most saintly among us, we all snap sooner or later.

Last week, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority snapped. After only a few years of Jackson’s presence on the bench, the fatigue had become too much to bear. When the rest of us snap, we are likely to be reprimanded by mom, or a teacher, or human resources; it’s not at all probable that Barrett will get a call from H.R. telling her to play nice.

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