Laying Down The Law: Justice Jackson Dissents
Dearest Reader,
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first black woman appointed to the Supreme Court in its 236 year history. When the justice published her memoir Lovely One in 2024 it was very moving to see her and her story of tremendous achievement be celebrated. Justice Jackon is an Associate Justice on the current nine justice Supreme Court. Currently six of the nine justices are conservative in their rulings, whereas Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Jackson make out the liberal or I would say, standard post WWII representation of the court. The conservative justices of the court Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice SamuelAlito, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney-Barrett represent the conservative flank or let’s say the constitutional originalist movement in the court (namely all conservatives except, perhaps, the Chief Justice are out and proud originalists).
The originalists, as I will refer to them, believe in a literal and archaic reading of the U.S. Constitution. Basically, like some readers of the Holy Bible, the originalists believe the Constitution is perfect and we are best to take everything from the first draft from 1787 as gospel and not as a living document meant to be contextualized. Because who are we to question “the good book”? Well except for originalists themselves because they know what the founders intended. Originalists are like Catholic priests in colonial Ireland imbued with immense authority—they know best. Then flash forward to 2025 and we are literally excavating the buried remains of hundreds of children in mass graves on church property.
I often hear the phrase “post-Dobbs” referring to authoritarian ethos after the Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. In June 2022 this same court of nine justices in a 6-3 ruling effectively revoked Roe v. Wade protecting a woman’s right to an abortion. Remember that in May 2022 a leaked draft of the conservative majority decision to end Roe was obtained by Politico? At that moment, everyone across the country started to come to Jesus, no pun intended, about the Supreme Court moving to end 49 years of a woman’s right to choose. With absolute cynicism and an eye for entertainment, the FBI under Kash Patel plans to further investigate who leaked that majority opinion to the public a month before the feminist atomic bomb dropped. Like Roe, the urgency of voting rights may come after they are effectively gone. Looking to key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that have been gutted by the Supreme Court since 2013, these rights, even now, stand to be further reduced. Just this week, in a bold move that betrays the lawlessness of our times, Trump announced a new gerrymandering campaign to secure 5 additional GOP house seats and prevent any checks on power emerging from the 2026 midterms.
Last term, Supreme Court Justice Jackson, the newest justice on the court after her historic appointment in February 2022, wrote five majority opinions—the fewest among her liberal colleagues which makes some sense according to seniority. However, Justice Jackson managed to make her voice heard through a notable number of dissenting opinions—more than twenty all told. Justice Jackson, who studied oratory and debate throughout her life, even before attending Harvard University for her undergraduate and Havard Law for her legal education is a talented communicator. When the court’s term concluded in early July this year, Justice Jackson had submitted many dissenting opinions. As one of the three liberal justices, she has become a beacon through a dark time. Her dissenting opinions provide a kind of reality-based truth telling about how the current administration seeks to consolidate power, as well as, how the efforts of the six conservative justices or status quo thinking may account for an alarming descent into lawlessness. One of her most poignant dissenting opinions regards Trump executive order (EO) 14210 from February that initiated mass layoffs across various federal agencies before being halted on the merits by a discerning district court judge.
Before I continue, it should be noted that Justice Jackson has worked across every level of the judiciary as she noted in a recent Forbes Magazine interview, including the only justice with experience as a public defender. As the first African American woman on the court, Justice Jackson has taken the mantle of representing the people of the United States in a venue most will never enter. What seems to be happening is that federal and state courts are being undermined or ignored by the executive and even when they do their due diligence on the facts of a case and deem it unlawful—again with evidence of that—the Supreme Court with its conservative majority is siding with the executive as though Donald Trump is a helpless infant in need of saving. Indeed, it seems, even on rare occasions liberal Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor succumb to palace intrigue and opt for consensus whereas Justice Jackson appears more stalwart, not just disagreeing to disagree but making principled reasoned positions from a very clear post WWII American worldview. At fifty-four years old with teenage children, Justice Jackson understands the assignment.
In her dissenting opinion re: EO 14210 after a July 8th conservative majority ruling to allow for Trump’s mass firings to proceed—even given the recent Texas flash flood, mass death tragedy that could have been prevented or mitigated by key federal vacancies and other cuts from imprecise austerity:
“Congress has the power to establish administrative agencies and detail their functions. Thus, over the past century, Presidents who have attempted to reorganize the Federal Government have first obtained authorization from Congress to do so. The President sharply departed from that settled practice on February 11, 2025, however, by allegedly arrogating this power to himself.
[This] unilateral decision to “transfor[m]” the Federal Government was quickly challenged in federal court. As relevant here, the District Judge thoroughly examined the evidence, considered applicable law, and made a reasoned determination that Executive Branch officials should be enjoined from implementing the mandated restructuring until this legal challenge to the President’s authority to undertake such action could be litigated.
[But] that temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture. The Court has now stayed the District Court’s preliminary injunction—authorizing implementation of Executive Order No. 14210, and all the harmful upheaval that edict entails, while the lower courts evaluate its lawfulness. In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground.”
This dissent, in particular, stands out to me because it not only calls out this conservative majority for favoring Trump’s anti-democratic restructuring of the federal government, but it also recognizes the work of the lower courts as integral to making reasoned, fact-based decisions (because they do the work!) even from the high perch of the Supreme Court. In an April newsletter, I wrote about the authoritarian need to consolidate power and how important it is to subdue the courts. Given the ruling on EO 14210 and the pending senate bill H.R. 1526 that passed the house in an effort to undermine “rogue courts” that allegedly intervene with Trump’s agenda, to rely solely on the courts in this crisis is foolhardy.
I also broke down the current version and stages of authoritarianism we face in a newsletter here. Controlling the courts, education and information (media, online, etc) is what the autocrat needs to dominate reality and cow the public in fear. And it seems that even without H.R. 1526, through the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices, they are helping Trump override the will of the people, the authority of congress and the integrity of the courts.
This term, the Supreme Court has ruled on a number of cases I want to highlight for their consequential potential:
In an effort to restrict access to pornography for children, the Supreme Court sided with Texas on a 6-3 decision in June to implement age verification (including ID documents or information) to websites in order to allegedly restrict access to children. On the surface this looks noble, children should obviously be shielded from mature content like porn, but it actually opens up a path for laws restricting free speech on the basis of “protecting children.” I think it’s a Trojan horse that has less to do with protecting the innocence of children than controlling the speech of adults.
In a case reminiscent of the UK’s former conservative parliament’s batshit attempt to deport migrants to Rwanda that was eventually struck down by the U.K. Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court actually legalized deportations of immigrants to third countries—places the immigrant may have no ties to or means of living. Nations like Libya and South Sudan, both ravaged by war, are options of said deportations. So far immigrants, some with violent or criminal records but not all, have already been dropped in El Salvador, South Sudan, Eswatini and I suspect more to come. For obvious reasons this conjures the debacle of Liberia and Sierra Leone where African Americans were sent in significant numbers in the 1800s—in short, it led to war. Even short of war this is all legally dubious and a deeply dehumanizing choice that should be reversed.
In January Trump issued an EO to revoke birthright citizenship after 150 years. Although most scholars reject the even distant possibility of legally removing citizenship when someone is born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. I would argue that the conversation itself is crazy and creates space for concessions like targeting naturalized citizens, permanent residents and other visa-holding immigrants—perhaps eventually demonizing certain natural-born citizens as non-conformists of some kind. Even in the cases of so-called illegal entry there should be due process and a path to citizenship for those who need amnesty, refuge or can meet reasonable benchmarks. This game of who is and who is not “illegal” is a dangerous one. A tiny percentage of immigrants commit crimes, so who are we targeting? Even current ICE data shows that 72% of those detained have not been convicted of a crime, let alone a violent crime. Furthermore, empirical research reveals that immigrants are very unlikely to commit crimes and actually increase community safety overall. In authoritarian terms the U.S. based immigration debate is rife with confusion as we have already seen and is primed for exploitation as is already happening. We are currently building massive privately run detention centers now injected with $45 billion from the July 4th budget bill--so who exactly will be filling up these facilities?
I needed to pen this week’s newsletter because things are ratcheting up. My hot take on Epstein is that an animal is more violent when it's cornered. And given the voluminous backlash over quashing the federal investigation of the Epstein files, a stockpile of evidence on deceased sexual predator and shady financier Jeffrey Epstein, I suspect the longer it persists the more dangerous this administration will become. Just this week, popular left-leaning podcast, Medius Touch with 2.4 million followers, was flagged for a ban on TikTok after posting 2 reports on Epstein and the president’s ties. So armed with many legal wins from conservative justices, a weak congress plus subjugated educational and legal institutions, for this administration people power may be our most impervious tool of resistance.
Train your eyes on Justice Jackson’s dissent. As she said at the close of a recent Forbes Magazine interview at an Indianapolis Bar Association when asked “what keeps you up at night?”:
“[What keeps me up at night is] the state of our democracy. [uproarious applause] I would say that I am really very interested in getting people to focus and to invest and to pay attention to what is happening in our country and in our government.”
With Love During End Times,
Agunda
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