Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Unethical Quote of the Month From The Worst SCOTUS Justice Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“[T]he majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”

—-Justice Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, again putting into black-and-white her intolerable political bias and lack of judicial decorum in her dissent to the 6-3 majority SCOTUS decision, a 10-page, unsigned opinion staying an injunction by a federal judge against the implementation of President Trump’s executive order imposing restrictions on mail-in voting.

I won’t pretend to know enough about the substantive law underlying the majority decision, and after trying to read Justice Jackson’s seemingly endless dissent, my brain hurts. However, I can say with ethical certainty that a judge who is automatically inclined to ascribe sinister motives to an elected President’s actions should be disqualified from weighing in on any controversy regarding those actions.

I read Trump’s EO regarding mail-in ballots as consistent with his oath of office and the definition of his powers under the Constitution. Mail-in ballots threaten the integrity of Federal elections and therefore the Constitution itself. There are limits to state sovereignty in determining election regulations and procedures, something Justice Jackson refuses to acknowledge. Gee, I wonder why only 23 states have challenged the EO. Which states might they be?

Elsewhere in her “War and Peace”-length dissent, Jackson complains that the claim that mail-in ballots risk election integrity hasn’t been proven. In fact, some courts have taken judicial notice of the fact, and it is a fact and an obvious fact, that mail-in ballots are unacceptably vulnerable to fraud. But I digress. The ethics issue now is that a Supreme Court Justice begins her analysis of an Executive Branch controversy with the biased presumption that the President of the United States is not pursuing what he believes is in the best interests of the nation under the Constitution. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has again demonstrated that she is a dangerous blight on the Court, the Separation of Powers, and the functioning of U.S. constitutional government.

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Pointer: SCOTUS blog

Oh-Oh…The New Supreme Court Justice Made One Of The Worst Analogies I’ve Ever Heard

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I’m going to give Justice Jackson the benefit of the doubt. Anyone, even a distinguished judge, can have a bad day and say something that just doesn’t come out right. Still, it must be said, her contribution to the many analogies and hypotheticals being tossed around in the Supreme Court during the oral argument of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the case where a web designer claims that forcing her to create a wedding website for a same-sex couple violates her First Amendment Rights, was jaw-droppingly bad. Frightening, even.

Justice Neil Gorsuch had correctly noted that the objection at issue was not based on the status of the same-sex couple, but instead, the message that the business owner did not want to send. The question isn’t the “who” Gorsuch said, but the “what.” Exactly. And that’s why CNN’s headline on the case, “Supreme Court conservatives seem to side with website designer who doesn’t want to work with same-sex couples” is false and misleading. Lorie Smith has been very clear that she will work for anyone; she just won’t make same-sex wedding websites. It’s not “Who,” but “What.”

Now consider Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s rejoinder. Pay attention, please:

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