Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that the current “state of our democracy” here in the United States is what most keeps her up at night.
The justice appointed by former President Joe Biden issued her thoughts about American democracy when speaking to an audience at the Indianapolis Bar Association in Indiana this week.
“I would say the state of our democracy,” Jackson said in response to a question about what keeps her up at night. “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.”
The justice did not provide any specifics as to what concerned her most about American democracy. Like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she has routinely opposed the Trump administration in several rulings. However, Sotomayor directly challenged Brown Jackson’s dissent in an 8-1 ruling this week.
As Breitbart News reported this week, Jackson sharply criticized recent rulings from her conservative-leaning colleagues during an interview with ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis at the Global Black Economic Forum:
In her first appearance since the High Court ruled that judges cannot abuse their powers by regularly issuing nationwide injunctions to halt an administration’s policies, Justice Jackson said she believes rulings from the court’s conservative majority pose an “existential threat to the rule of law.”
“Sometimes we have cases that have those kinds of implications, and, you know, are there cases in which there are issues that have that kind of significance? Absolutely,” Jackson told Davis.
Jackson issued a similar criticism last month in a dissenting opinion for Trump v. Casa, in which the majority ruled in the controversial “birthright citizenship” case that lower courts cannot simply issue nationwide injunctions, and that doing so is an abuse of their judicial power. In her dissent, Jackson wrote that she has “no doubt that executive lawlessness will flourish because of the decision,” and that she predicts “executive power will become completely uncontainable.”
During her remarks at the Indianapolis Bar Association, moderator U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson asked Jackson if she was ever bothered by a majority opinion’s response to a dissent.
“I have a very thick skin,” Jackson responded. “My parents gave to me a sense of my own ability to write and to speak out and to say what I have to say and to not be really offended by other people saying what they have to say. I actually don’t get my feelings hurt, what I do is I try to respond as effectively as I can in my writings.”
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