There comes a point when even the most loyal defenders of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have to admit the truth. Her tenure on the Supreme Court has been a humiliating disaster for her, rife with sloppy reasoning, bizarre analogies, and judicial activism masquerading as constitutional interpretation. Joe Biden selected her not for her legal acumen but because she is a black woman. He did not attempt to hide it, and since she was confirmed, she’s done nothing to prove she belongs on the court.
Jackson treats oral arguments like a personal soapbox. Instead of asking clarifying questions about the legal issues at hand, she launches into lectures that sound more like activist talking points than serious jurisprudence. She routinely veers away from the actual case to push leftist narratives, making it clear she sees herself less as an impartial arbiter and more as a social justice warrior in a black robe.
That alone is enough to make her a hero of the left, but at some point, even the left has to admit Jackson is an intellectual lightweight who talks more than any of her fellow justices but has the least substance.
Her rambling questions and strained analogies read like half-baked blog posts, not the work of someone equipped to sit on the nation's highest court.
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Even her liberal colleagues on the court, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, have noticed. It’s true. They often decline to join her dissents. The problem isn’t so much her ideology but the absence of legal reasoning to support it. A justice can be liberal and still command respect through sound logic and careful analysis. Jackson offers neither.
Take her performance during oral arguments over Louisiana redistricting. Jackson compared the failure to create a second majority-black district to the lack of wheelchair ramps before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. The analogy was historically incoherent and legally irrelevant, and frankly, insulting.
Another doozy came during oral arguments over protecting women's sports earlier this month. Jackson stumbled over basic terminology, posed incoherent hypotheticals, and seemed unfamiliar with core concepts underlying the case. At one point, the government's own lawyer had to walk her through elementary legal ideas.
But, perhaps the craziest thing she’s done came on Tuesday, during oral arguments over a Hawaii gun control law.Jackson invoked the post-Civil War Black Codes as relevant "history and tradition" under the Bruen framework for evaluating gun regulations. These laws were explicitly designed to oppress freed slaves and disarm black citizens so the Klan could terrorize them.
Yeah, she was literally defending those laws as legitimate legal precedent, since the Black Codes were considered constitutional when they were passed. According to Jackson’s argument, slavery and segregation should be regarded as legitimate legal precedents today.
Conservatives have been saying since 2022 that Jackson was a DEI hire, and boy, were we right. At what point does the left stop pretending she belongs on the Supreme Court and admit what everyone else already knows?
