Former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine said on Wednesday that he is not a fan of how political Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sometimes appears to be.
Even the other liberal justices on the bench wouldn’t join Jackson on Tuesday in opposing President Donald Trump’s administration’s endeavors to downsize the federal workforce. In response to a caller’s question on “The Morning Meeting,” Turrentine criticized Jackson’s aggressiveness and said that she may ultimately prove to “be a stain on” former President Joe Biden’s legacy.
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“It’s interesting because in the history of the Court, there have been members who have been in the minority — sometimes just one or two — and then 20 years later, they’re not in the minority anymore,” Turrentine said. “And kind of history, you know, the world has moved towards them.”
“I don’t love the tone of her — she — at times, she sounds like a politician. And that is — you know, again, you can say what you want — it’s a free country,” he continued. “But I don’t love it when she uses kind of that really aggressive language. Maybe she’ll be proven right. But I don’t think she’s doing herself any favor with her colleagues. And depending on where the country goes, it may be a stain on Biden.”
Jackson called the decision of her eight fellow justices to let Trump’s executive order mandating large-scale workforce reductions take effect “hubristic and senseless” in a dissent.
“Consider the harms to democracy, too, if it turns out that the plaintiffs and the lower courts are right that the President is unilaterally changing the structure of the Federal Government,” Jackson wrote. “What one person (or President) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer’s prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner’s chance to breathe free from black lung, or a preschooler’s opportunity to learn in a safe environment.”
Fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed a president cannot restructure federal agencies on his own, but noted the executive order simply directed agencies to form plans for decreasing the workforce “consistent with applicable law.”
“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law,” Sotomayor wrote.
Jackson also criticized the majority for supposedly “releas[ing] the President’s wrecking ball” to the federal bureaucracy in the dissent.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday that Jackson was losing the backing of her fellow liberal justices.
“[O]n this occasion, Jackson is alone. She couldn’t even get Justice Sotomayor to sign onto this dissent. Keep in mind, what Sotomayor noted in her concurrence is that this order was simply having agencies plan for downsizing and she said we can hardly stop that,” Turley said. “Well, yeah, Jackson believes you can and this is part of a signature of what’s becoming some sort of a judicial abandon that Jackson has towards the power of these courts.”
Jackson has entered a rift with her fellow justices as she has grown more critical of the high court in her dissenting decisions. She also issued a blistering dissent in Trump v. CASA, which restricted district courts’ uses of nationwide injunctions, writing that the decision was an “existential threat to the rule of law.”
Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett strongly rebuked Jackson in her CASA opinion.
“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,” Barrett wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
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