The Supreme Court smacks down “imperial” district court judges
And Amy Coney Barrett smacks down Ketanji Brown Jackson as well.
The case itself was about Trump’s birthright citizenship EO, but the decision is only about the nationwide injunction aspect of it, and therefore has more universal applications to the recent phenomenon of the overreach of district court judges in issuing sweeping injunctions. I wrote about that topic recently in this post as well as this one. In the latter post, I quoted Jonathan Turley, who pointed out that:
Under President George W. Bush, there were only six such injunctions, which increased to 12 under Obama.
However, when Trump came to office, he faced 64 such orders in his first term.
When Biden and the Democrats returned to office, it fell back to 14. …
Yet, when Trump returned to office, the number of national injunctions soared again in the first 100 days and surpassed the number for the entirety of Biden’s term.
It is a favorite anti-Trump tool of the left, which can invariably forum-shop to get a friendly judge to cooperate.
Today the Supreme Court said No to that – with a few loopholes remaining. The vote was 6 to 3, with the usual division of justices The title of the present post stems from this passage in the majority opinion, written by Amy Coney Barrett:
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. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.
That packs a lot into just a few words – the lack of precedent and the lack of Constitutional authority for the practice, as well as the double standard about overreach.
More quotes from Barrett’s opinion:
The lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate; we therefore leave it to them to consider these and any related arguments …
The Government’s applications to partially stay the preliminary injunctions are granted, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue. The lower courts shall move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule and otherwise comply with principles of equity.
Justice Thomas issued this warning in his concurring opinion (joined by Gorsuch):
Courts must not distort “the rule that injunctive relief should be no more burdensome to the defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs.” …
Lower courts should carefully heed this Court’s guidance and cabin their grants of injunctive relief in light of historical equitable limits. If they cannot do so, this Court will continue to be “dutybound” to intervene.
From Alito:
But district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors of Rule 23. Otherwise, the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of “nationwide class relief,” and today’s decision will be of little more than minor academic interest.
And lawyer “shipwreckedcrew” tweeted:
The FACT that six Justices were OK with signing onto an opinion where Justice Barrett took a personal shot at Justice Jackson is a VERY STRONG indication that Jackson has alienated her colleagues and there is a growing lack of respect for her work.
The interpersonal elements are interesting. But the important thing is the ruling – and whether the left will be able to get around it. If they try, however, it might just go back to the same SCOTUS, which I hope would be able to stop them again.
NOTE: Yes, KBJ’s reasoning was very murky here, and there’s plenty of evidence that she’s not as smart as a SCOTUS justice should be. But how much does intelligence matter when a person is a leftist activist judge? Ruth Bader Ginsburg was plenty smart, and that didn’t stop her from voting almost exclusively for the left. Same for Kagan.
For a leftist activist judge, I guess being intelligent (or clever anyway) may only help with the text of opinions themselves – that is, how well a given justice is able to gussy up whatever nonsense argument (“penumbras” and “emanations”) they and their clerks can come up with. RBG was at least pretty good at that. Ketanji Brown Jackson not so much.
I think the Dunning-Kruger effect is germane. It’s not that Jackson is unintelligent. Like Kamala Harris, she’s a striver who has taken full advantage of a system that has wanted her to succeed no matter what because of her skin color.
She was a middling lawyer, then a middling judge, and now she’s a terrible Justice. Why? Because, as the sportswriters say, she began to believe her own press clippings.
Because she’s been succeeding upward, she’s managed to convince herself she’s actually qualified for the position she holds, even though in the day-to-day of it she seems somewhat at sea. She probably thinks all the other justices feel like her, when in fact they’re exactly different. But now she’s been doing the job for a while, and so she thinks she’s far better at it than she really is. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, in other words.
The fact that the entire country is watching and thinks she’s incompetent doesn’t matter; at this point she would probably think, “well, I’m here and they’re there. QED.” Or something.
In the meantime, she and her clerks are able to camouflage her lack of judicial oomph with flowery language and a shotgun approach to citing cases, essentially making her the stupid person’s idea of a competent jurist. Crockett will be comparing her to Thurgood Marshall before long.
Winning!!
That shipwreckedcrew tweet is really stunning. I’ve only casually followed court opinions but that’s as close to a personal “you are an idiot” excerpt from a decision I’ve ever seen.
KJB’s issues could be caused by lack of legal acumen, or by ideological rigidity. I wouldn’t want to speculate as to which and, frankly, I don’t care.
All in all, I think those on the right should be thankful for KBJ and Sotomayor. Whether their deficiencies are rooted in skill or ideology, there is very little risk that either one is going to dazzle one or more of the conservatives with their brilliant legal analysis. Now Kagan, on the other hand, has done just that before.
“ If they try, however, it might just go back to the same SCOTUS, which I hope would be able to stop them again.”
Therein lies the rub. Let’s hope they don’t treat this as they do the second amendment. Despite grand pronouncements, like heller and bruen, Scotus refuses to grant cert when states and circuit courts openly flout them. The statement by Kavanaugh when Maryland banned the most common type of rifle in the United States, the AR 15, was particularly outrageous. Basically, Kav said that Maryland citizens had to wait their turn to restore their constitutional rights.
You know that the district judges will push as hard as they can, just like the Massachusetts judge Brian Murphy has openly defied a Scotus ruling on the immigration case. So far he’s getting away with it.
The possibility that Trump may have the opportunity to nominate a new supreme court justice, in and of itself was reason enough to vote for him instead of for Kamala Cackler Harris.
Can you imagine if the incredibly dumb and stupid Cackler was president and she needed to nominate a supreme court justice. There would then be TWO Jackson’s on the court plus Sotomayor and Kagan.
A dumb progressive Justice will work to advance progressive causes in a dumb way, and a smart one work in a smart way. Maybe count our blessings here.
Intelligent people are sometimes better at reasoning than most, but usually better at rationalizing. As Dr Johnson said
Probably the most catastrophic rationalizations smart people take these two forms:
1) An argument that because it’s always worked before, it will work now.
2) An argument that this time it’s different, and what never worked before will work now.
But on a day in, day out basis they go wrong by believing that the words they read match what is real. As C. S. Lewis said
Sotomayer and Kagan are 68 and 62.
In the last year of Biden’s term Vox was asking whether S and K ought to consider resigning lest a rerun of RBG’s failure to do so allowed Trump to appoint a conservative justice in her place.
Neither S nor K resigned. It could be a long time before Democrats have the President and Senate again and are able appoint another radical justice.
KBJ is only 53 so she’s likely to be around for a while.
Niketas Choniates: wise words here. Kagan is formidable, she ain’t dumb.
Neither Kagan nor the wise Latina look particularly metabolicly healthy. Thomas didn’t either, but I suspect his wife is impressing a healthier diet on him. I’d bet she has his clerks helping.
Something to keep in mind
https://x.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1938630964961575050
She may be a fool but also knave
“She may be a fool but also knave.”
– Miguel c.
Just so.
She’s a communist, and the revolution is always foremost for her. Any communist that’s inside our system is a knave because they intend to bring it down. But she’s also not a very bright communist because she’s not good at disguising her beliefs.
I thought better of Kagan than to see her dissent from this obviously correct legal ruling. I expect idiocy and political, not legal, opinions from Jackson and Sotomayor.
Justice Jackson is the poster girl for DEI hires.
Here’s a contrary view:
_______________________________
The Supreme Court on Friday dealt a grievous blow to separation of powers by holding that federal courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions to halt unconstitutional actions by the president and the federal government. At a time when President Trump is asserting unprecedented powers, the court made it far more difficult to restrain his unconstitutional actions….
The practical consequences are enormous. It would mean that to challenge the constitutionality of a presidential action or federal law a separate lawsuit will need to be brought in all 94 federal districts.
–Erwin Chemerinsky, “A stunning and tragic Supreme Court decision”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/contributor-stunning-tragic-supreme-court-173500208.html
_______________________________
Chemerinsky doesn’t examine the consequences of any one of 94 federal judges blocking the orders of the President of the United States, head of the executive branch.
Nor does Chemerinsky question his prejudice that Trump is acting without precedent and likely in an unconstitutional manner.
Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, so his politics aren’t hard to guess. I first heard him on Hugh Hewitt twenty years ago.
John Derbyshire summarized the Supremes as follows:
As I have explained many times to foreign friends, since it was explained to me by a learned man when I first came to this country, the justices of SCOTUS are not very exceptional persons. They are not even very exceptional lawyers.
Someone above asserted that Kagan is smart. I suppose so, given that she managed to be the dean [?] of Harvard’s law school. But with her “I don’t understand the plaintiffs’ objection to boatloads of federal money to give poor people health care” [approximate quote] in the 2012 Obamacare challenge, she absolutely proved that she’s a lightweight.
Sotomanure similarly established herself as a lightweight (besides being a not very “wise Latina”) in some other case I can’t specify right now.
Looks like KBJ has just asserted her bona fides in the Lightweights Club.
Here’s Rush Limbaugh on Kagan and her boatload: https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/30/elena_kagan_how_can_giving_a_boatload_of_money_to_poor_people_be_unconstitutional/
@Paul Nachman:But with her “I don’t understand
I think someone above pointed it out but “I don’t understand” is progressive-speak for “I don’t agree”. I don’t think she could literally not understand it. Rush’s excerpt of her quote does not have the words “I don’t understand”:
She’s inviting someone to explain their reasoning while expressing that on its face she is already skeptical.
— Kate
We always need to keep in mind that the judiciary, including the SCOTUS, are politics at one remove. Federal Judges are appointed by Presidents. Both parties necessarily take political reliability into account when making these choices. The GOP often consider other factors too, the Dems consider little else but political reliability.
Also, the SCOTUS is a committee, which inevitably means that deals must be made between Justices. It’s a cynical old adage about the SCOTUS that ‘five votes can do anything’. But to get those 5 votes, trades have to happen, deals have to be struck. “You sign off on my ruling and I’ll agree to vote for cert. for such and such a case.” “You modify your ruling by x and y, and I’ll support it in spite of z.” And so on.
I’m not saying the actual legal arguments and persuasion are irrelevant, but the back room deals and political element is always in play, John Roberts’ nonsensical denials not withstanding.
A follow-on post by Ace.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/415418.php
Supreme Court Rules That States May Stop Medicaid Payments to Planned Parenthood, Completely
Update: Ketanji Brown Jackson Confesses Dozeons [sic] of Times “I Just Don’t Understand”
File under “Tell us how you really feel”.
I kind of doze on when KJB talks too, but I think Ace meant dozens.
It should (I almost typed “must”) be obvious that the six Justices who seem to have coalesced into “the conservative block” have decided to finally issue a statement about the ignominy of being coerced into accepting into their midst a person who clearly and unequivocally does not belong there. As to Kagan and Sotomayor, they are leftist idealogues who care nothing about that, since it is only the political position she espouses that matters to them. And as to what Chemerinsky says, it is another case of leftist solidarity, damn the facts and the law. He has been a dancing monkey for the left for as long as I can remember.
huxley – Chemerinsky is a thoroughgoing lefty. You can count on him to provide the progressive spin on any decision.
Kate and HC-68 – Some court watchers have suggested that Kagan has burned a portion of her credibility with the 6 conservatives by swinging so hard to the left in the Trump era.
IMO, the problem with leftoid judges is that ingenuity trumps integrity. It’s doubtful that KBJ is intellectually deficient.
==
BTW, the habit of stacking the Supreme Court with Ivy League alumni previously employed as federal appeals judges took hold around about 1986. Prior to that, the background of Supreme Court nominees was much more variegated. (Harriet Miers and Amy Coney Barrett are the only nominees in the last 40 years who have lacked and Ivy League degree; Miers and Elena Kagan are the only ones who were not federal appellate judges previously).
very normal reactions, yike,
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/template-saturday-june-28-2025-c
they seem to subscribe to the notion that insanity is the default state,
like O’brien, two and two are five in their calculus,
Justice Kagan, in 2022:
Burning credibility, indeed.
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/06/28/justice-kagans-own-words-just-exposed-the-lefts-hypocrisy-on-nationwide-injunctions-n4941256
its not hypocrisy, because their only criteria is power, they were prevented from going full throttle prog, that is the real objection, anything that stands athwart ‘the right side of history,’ whatever that means, so Obama berated and threatened the Court and he got Obamacare, no matter what Balloon animal, dread pirate Roberts had to fashion, they used the independent counsel statute as a broadsword, and when they are the focus, they cite Morison, in fact even when the statute went away, they still fashioned a weapon to proscribe their enemies no matter how spurious the pretext,
obama made it clear ‘fundamental transformation’ is the watchword, specially those institutions that still work must be destroyed, or reformed to serve their priorities, Art Science, the relations between men and women, should go by the fire
it is only a threat to democracy, when they are under the microscope, otherwise its standard operating procedure, did they conjure up the Biden
Rule, the gang of eight, that determined how any changes to the court must go,
I don’t understand how someone who proudly admits not being able to understand what a “woman” is can be expected to understand anything.
I truly don’t understand it.
Meow.
— Bauxite
Maybe…but this touches on another important issue.
We do not have six conservative Justices. This is critically important. We do not even have six reasonably Constitutionalist Justices.
The actual SCOTUS breakdown is 3 hard-core libs (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson), and four more-or-less conservatives of one flavor or another (Thomas, Barrett, Alito, Kavenaugh), with Gorsuch as a conservative-more-often-than-not, and then there is John Roberts.
The 6-3 ruling could in theory have survived a defection by Gorsuch, Barrett, Thomas, Kavenaugh, or Alito. Except that I very strongly suspect that if such a defection had happened, then Roberts would also have flipped and turned it into a 6-3 defeat for the ‘good guys’.
Why? Good question. I’m basing it simply on Roberts’ overall track record. He has a record of voting with the conservatives, except when it really counts.
Most (in)famously on his Obamacare ruling, that basically reversed all the arguments the program’s defenders had used to pass it in order to avoid striking it down on Constitutional grounds.
In this case, him crossing over by himself would just have made it a 5/4 ruling and affected nothing, so it wasn’t an issue either way. If one of the right wing justices abstained or crossed over, I suspect Roberts would have as well.
Then there was his facially nonsensical claim that:
— Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts
If he really, truly believes that, he’s out of touch with reality and not competent to hold the status he holds.
I doubt he really believes it, I think he said it because he sees himself as a defender of the judiciary, trying to restore its reputation and status. But he can’t do that in today’s political climate. We’re too divided for that.
As for his tendency to vote with the left when it counts, there have been all kinds of theories about the why of that, from blackmail to secret ideology, but nobody really knows. My own suspicion is that like a lot of GOP Senators, he hopes to wait out Trump and MAGA and return to the old status quo, though your guess is as good as mine why.
I don’t think it’ll work out that way.
HC68:
If you want my take on Roberts and what motivates him, please see this.
One big exception to the behavior by Roberts that I describe there, however, was his later ruling in Dobbs, where he voted with the conservative majority to overturn Roe.
I think Roberts is motivated to keep Congress from taking a much more active role in regulating the judiciary. A POTUS with loyal control of Congress can clip their wings in all kinds of ways.