Smug & self serving applies ...

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has emerged as a forceful critic of her conservative colleagues and, lately, their approach to the Trump agenda.Credit...Pool photo by Chip Somodevilla

Judge Jackson speaks the truth. 6 of the supremes are NOT supreme. They sound grammatically correct and patently judicial but actions speak louder than words. Think Citizens United, Hobby Lobby and the court allowing DOGE access to SSA data kinda sums it up in terms of how awful this court truly is. Truth is not spin, it's clear, decisive and legitimate. Her call articulating the deficiencies of the big 6 is spot on IMHO.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote just five majority opinions in the Supreme Court term that ended last month, the fewest of any member of the court. But her voice resonated nonetheless, in an unusually large number of concurring and dissenting opinions, more than 20 in all.

Several of them warned that the court was taking lawless shortcuts, placing a judicial thumb on the scale in favor of President Trump and putting American democracy in peril. She called the majority’s opinion in the blockbuster case involving birthright citizenship, issued on the final day of the term, “an existential threat to the rule of law.” could come as soon as this year,  or at least in the next few decades.

President Trump’s supporters were delighted by Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s
criticism of Justice Jackson.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

“She’s breaking the fourth wall, speaking beyond the court,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University. “She is alarmed at what the court is doing and is sounding that in a different register, one that is less concerned with the appearance of collegiality and more concerned with how the court appears to the public.”

Justice Jackson added her own dissent, speaking only for herself. She said the majority imperiled the rule of law, creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”

That prompted an extended response from Justice Barrett, the next most junior justice and the author of the majority opinion. It did not stint on condescension.

“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,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion signed by all five of the other Republican appointee.

Smug & self serving applies, does it not?