Jackson earns jabs from liberal justice as colleagues increasingly rebuke her in opinions

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson earned a jab from one of her liberal colleagues on Tuesday as the justices increasingly feel compelled to single her out in legal opinions.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted a stay of a lower court ruling that halted the Trump administration's mass layoffs. Jackson was the sole dissenting voice. In a concurring opinion, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressly addressed and shut down Jackson's arguments.

"I agree with JUSTICE JACKSON that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates," Sotomayor wrote. "Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force 'consistent with applicable law.'"

"The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law," she added.

Jackson, in her dissenting opinion, explicitly asserted that the issue at hand was the matter of the restructuring, which Sotomayor unambiguously rejected.

"What is at issue here is whether Executive Order No. 14210 affects a massive restructuring of the Federal Government (the likes of which have historically required Congress’s approval), on the one hand, or minor workforce reductions consistent with existing law, on the other," Jackson argued. As Sotomayor wrote, the merits of the reforms were not the matter before the court.

Though a relatively soft rebuke, Sotomayor's singling out of Jackson marks the latest incident of a Supreme Court justice feeling the need to explicitly slap down the Biden appointee.

In late June, the Supreme Court's conservatives issued a far more scathing rebuke of Jackson, asserting that she sought an "imperial judiciary" and implying that her arguments were so frivolous as to be unworthy of significant regard.

"We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary," wrote Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. 

"JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: '[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by
law.' That goes for judges too," Barrett added.