When it comes to U.S. Supreme Court decisions, feelings are not supposed to play a determinative role.
We want a legal breakdown of how the justices interpret the law in any given case, not what they personally feel about it.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed to the panel by Joe Biden, just admitted that she is using her opinions to push her personal agenda, and it has quite a few people outraged, including this journalist.
In a recent decision from the high court, many felt that Justice Jackson crossed the line, and the usually demure Justice Amy Coney Barrett was among them, blatantly calling her out in the majority opinion.
Barrett wrote, "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."
She went on, "We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary."
Make no mistake about it, this was a verbal slap in the face to Jackson to dial down the partisan rhetoric and get back to the basics of giving a legal argument to back up your opinion.
Jackson has taken to pushing Democrat talking points during media interviews, recently stating that with a conservative majority on the Courts, she is concerned about the “state of our democracy.” (First, she needs to understand we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy, so there’s that.)
The justice, in the wake of outrage resulting from a recent dissent she authored, defended her choices, stating, "I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues, and that's what I try to do.”
That, to me, is beyond troublesome, as she sounds like a talk show host instead of a justice on the highest court in the country. How she personally feels is irrelevant. She is not a pundit. She is a Supreme Court justice.
I am far from being alone in these concerns.
The one constitutional expert whom I respect in today’s media is Jonathan Turley, and he just ripped Jackson over her comments, specifically noting that she has sounded more like a pundit than a jurist.
Turley wrote, “Her colleagues have not entirely welcomed that sense of license. The histrionic and hyperbolic rhetoric has increased in Jackson's opinions, which at times portray her colleagues as abandoning not just the Constitution but democracy itself.”
But as Turley noted, Jackson is hardly the only liberal judge to take this approach to publishing opinions, stating, “She is not alone. Across the country, liberal judges have been adding their own commentary to decisions in order to condemn Trump, his supporters, and his policies.”
While I do not believe every judge in every case against President Donald Trump or his administration has been an “activist” one, I do believe there have been quite a few of them. It is almost as though they are licking their chops to get a piece of Trump in the courtroom. Sadly, rather than condemning this, the media and Democrats are embracing it.