It’s not the first time Jackson has complained that her colleagues are weighing the scales of justice differently depending on who is asking for help.Show Caption
WASHINGTON – Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that her colleagues let themselves be manipulated by the Trump administration when the conservative majority on Aug. 24 agreed with the president that a challenge to his crackdown on mail-in ballots was premature.Rather than “swallow the Government’s gamesmanship whole,” Jackson argued in her scathing dissent, the court should have rejected the administration’s “bad-faith” request to lift a court order blocking implementation of the policy before the midterm elections.Instead, Jackson said, the court “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”“Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” she wrote.It’s not the first time Jackson has complained that her colleagues are weighing the scales of justice differently depending on who is asking for help.Earlier this year, Jackson warned about the court looking too partisan in a decision about congressional maps.In 2025, she said that the court was sending a “troubling message" that it's departing from basic legal standards for the administration.Since joining the court in 2022, Jackson has become a prolific and passionate dissenter, unafraid to criticize the conservative majority even when her fellow liberal justices do not always join her.In fact, the two other justices appointed by Democratic presidents – Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – separately wrote a much shorter and milder objection to the majority’s ruling that states couldn’t challenge Trump’s executive order on mailed ballots until regulations implementing the order were finalized.But Jackson highlighted what she said was a “flip-flop” in the reasoning the court used to side with Trump compared with a January decision in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections about when political candidates can challenge election rules.“That means either Bost is wrong or today’s decision is indefensible (or both),” Jackson wrote.Responding to Jackson’s criticism, the majority said she was fighting precedent set in a different case – the court’s 2025 decision limiting the ability of judges to block Trump’s attempt to redefine birthright citizenship.Although Jackson “wishes it were otherwise,” the majority wrote in their unsigned opinion, Trump can show an early court order pausing a policy was improper without also showing the policy itself is legal. In the birthright citizenship case, the court ultimately rejected Trump’s policy.And on his order cracking down on mail-in ballots, the majority said “time will tell” if the steps taken to implement it are lawful.
