Emergency rulings from the Supreme Court rarely offer a justification for the court’s decision, but that doesn’t mean the justices don’t have their own opinions.
Speaking to a room of federal lawyers and judges on Monday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the way that SCOTUS had used emergency rulings to aid the agenda of President Donald Trump. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, rulings from the court’s so-called “shadow docket” have squashed legal challenges to the president’s immigration policy and widespread federal layoffs.
Jackson called the “uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved” an “unfortunate problem.” She worried that rulings before the lower courts have had their say could put pressure on those courts to follow the SCOTUS line, creating “a warped kind of proceeding.”
“It’s not serving the court or this country well,” Jackson said.
Jackson has dissented in many of the emergency docket cases that went in Trump’s favor. In her dissent to the decision allowing Trump-ordered federal layoffs to proceed, she said that the Supreme Court’s decision was “hubristic and senseless.” Jackson joined a dissent to another layoffs ruling from Justice Sonia Sotomayor that called the ruling “a misuse of our emergency docket.”
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Both Jackson and Justice Brett Kavanaugh were speaking at the event. The conservative justice pushed back on Jackson’s characterization of the court’s actions. He said that SCOTUS was forced to act quickly in an era of increased executive orders. Kavanaugh said that congressional gridlock had led to a period where presidents are constantly “push[ing] the envelope” of executive power.
“None of us enjoy this,” Kavanaugh said.
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