Another Supreme Court term has wrapped up, and it wasn’t short on controversial landmark decisions.
As RedState reported, affirmative action in college admissions was struck down while Joe Biden’s illegal student loan forgiveness scheme also went up in smoke. Further, in a less sexy but equally important case, the court ruled against the EPA’s ability to arbitrarily define and regulate bodies of water.
If you are a fan of preserving personal freedom and equality under the law, the results were worthy of celebration. Unfortunately, many people, including some of the justices on the Supreme Court, have no care for such things. On that front, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made her mark, and not in a good way.
In what is being heralded as a triumph of diversity, Jackson used more words in oral arguments than any other justice over the last year. That’s being spun as evidence of her immense qualification and ability.
There’s something to be said about humility and realizing you don’t have all the answers, but that’s a completely foreign concept to Jackson. She attempted to bully her way through her first term, to the point that she ended up writing three solo dissents. But while members of the press are heralding that as a show of strength, it’s really an inadvertent admission that she’s just a terrible justice.
The fact that it took Chief Justice John Roberts over a decade-and-a-half before he wrote his first solo dissent should be a hint that writing three of them in a single term is not something to brag about. Solo dissents, by their very nature, should be incredibly rare and reserved for only the most extenuating of circumstances. Any justice making common use of them, much less writing three of them in a single first term, is advertising that their arguments are terrible and constitutionally illiterate, to the point that they weren’t able to garner a single other justice’s support.
That’s not to say there aren’t some exceptional situations where a solo dissent is justified, but it is to say that if a justice is writing three of them in their first term, the problem isn’t with the other justices. So, while the press proclaimed that Jackson “came to play,” all she really demonstrated is how inept and partisan she is.
And to be sure, this isn’t all hypothetical criticism. In her first term, Jackson managed to make several embarrassing mistakes. Here’s the most recent example.
To put it succinctly, Jackson’s first term on the Supreme Court was amateur hour, and her talking a lot is not an accomplishment. On the contrary, it shows a profound weakness in her ability to dissect matters in an unbiased and concise way. If a justice is wasting so many words in oral arguments, that’s usually because those words are being used to push a political preference and lead participants in a particular direction.
That’s not what the Supreme Court is supposed to be, but when it comes to the liberal justices, there is no eye toward the actual job at hand. Rather, they serve as just another arm of the Democratic Party. There is no provision of the Constitution sacrosanct enough to not be violated, if it contradicts the current thing.