_WHAT’S HAPPENING_
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered an extraordinary rebuke of fellow Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in Friday's ruling on Trump v. CASA, Inc.
The case addressed nationwide injunctions against President Donald Trump's day-one executive order regarding birthright citizenship. Barrett, writing for the 6-3 majority, accused Jackson of advancing arguments "at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself."
The ruling limits lower courts' ability to issue nationwide injunctions against presidential actions but doesn't address the constitutionality of Trump's order itself. Jackson's separate dissent warned that the ruling poses "an existential threat to the rule of law" — language Barrett dismissed as untethered from legal doctrine.
_THE FACTS_
In the majority opinion, Justice Barrett accused Justice Jackson of taking an "extreme" position and embracing an “imperial Judiciary.”
Barrett wrote that Jackson offers a judicial vision that would make “even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.”
Jackson dismissed the majority’s legal analysis as a “mind-numbingly technical query” and “boring ‘legalese.’”
Jackson’s dissent warned that the ruling was an “existential threat to the rule of law” that would make executive power “uncontainable.”
Her dissent also included informal slang atypical for the Supreme Court: “Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are…(wait for it)…the district courts.”
She accused the majority of getting “caught up in minutiae” and missing the larger plot of the case.
Barrett contrasted Jackson’s dissent with Justice Sotomayor’s, which she said focused on “conventional legal terrain.”
The ruling in Trump v. CASA specifically limited the power of district courts to issue nationwide injunctions, marking a win for President Trump.
_INSIGHTS_
Justice Amy Coney Barrett's scathing rebuke of Justice Jackson reveals how Jackson’s philosophy (or at least that of her clerks) appeared more political than legal and departed from the normal formality of the nation’s highest court.
On the substance, Jackson calls out Trump for acting like an imperial president by challenging the long-held view of US citizenship, yet at the same time pushes for nationwide injunctions that stretch the judiciary’s power beyond constitutional bounds.
Though the other liberal justices made similar points, none of them joined Jackson’s dissent, exemplifying how even her allies on the Court viewed her opinion as too far-out.
