Here’s How Sotomayor And Jackson’s Temper Tantrums Are Causing Headaches For Kagan
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been receiving a great deal of attention lately — and the reason has likely got fellow Justice Elena Kagan banging her head against the wall.
Sotomayor is raising eyebrows with remarks she gave at a University of Kansas School of Law event earlier this week. While it’s not uncommon for the justices to appear at such venues to speak to the public, what is uncommon is for the justices to use them as forums to levy personal attacks against their Supreme Court colleagues.
According to Bloomberg Law, the Obama appointee took a veiled shot at Justice Brett Kavanaugh over a concurrence he authored in a case before the court’s emergency or “interim” docket last year. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court paused a Biden-appointed judge’s injunction hamstringing ICE’s deportation operations in Los Angeles.
Kavanaugh defended the court’s decision in his concurrence, writing that the policy’s challengers “likely lack Article III standing to seek a broad injunction restricting immigration officers from making these investigative stops.” He further acknowledged the unlawfulness of illegal immigration and noted in part that, “as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
Writing for the dissent, Sotomayor accused the majority of “grave[ly[ misus[ing]” the court’s interim docket by granting the Trump administration’s applications for relief from leftists’ judicial coup. She also outlandishly claimed that the court’s decision endorsed the idea that the federal government can arbitrarily “seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”
While addressing Kavanaugh’s concurrence during her Kansas Law School appearance, Sotomayor took the rare step of lobbing a personal attack against her colleague and his upbringing. Though apparently not naming the Trump appointee, she reportedly said, “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. … This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
So much for that “the nine of us are now a family” line she parroted after Kavanaugh’s brutal Senate confirmation.
But Sotomayor is hardly the only left-wing justice to allow her frustrations with the court’s originalist decisions to spill over into personal attacks.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been well-known for chucking verbal hand grenades at her conservative colleagues and their decisions since joining the bench.
The Biden appointee openly lambasted the court’s rulings last year as an “existential threat to the rule of law.” This type of rhetoric has also translated into her opinions. In an interim docket case involving the Trump administration last year, she authored a solo dissent effectively accusing her Republican-appointed colleagues of abandoning all proper jurisprudence in order to bend over backward for the government.
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote at the time. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
Where all of this ties back to Kagan is that, unlike her fellow Democrat appointees, the former solicitor general has generally refrained from being overly aggressive with her Republican-appointed colleagues. In fact, she has reportedly sought to foster cordial relations with them since arriving at the high court as a means of finding areas of compromise that could ultimately limit the scope of an otherwise originalist opinion or potentially alter the outcome of a case altogether.
This reported strategy hit a road bump in 2018, however, when President Trump replaced retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, a purported moderate, with the more reliably originalist Kavanaugh. Kagan’s task got even more insurmountable when fellow leftist Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in 2020 and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, a move that expanded the court’s conservative majority from 5-4 to 6-3.
Not only is there no wayward Kennedy for Kagan to try and sway in high-profile cases, but she must now persuade at least two Republican appointees in order to achieve her desired outcome.
All of this is further compounded by Sotomayor’s and Jackson’s outbursts at the court’s Republican appointees. While the strategic Kagan attempts to find ways to limit originalist outcomes, her fellow leftists seem hellbent on needlessly making her objective more challenging than it already is.
The unfortunate reality for the three Democrat musketeers is that they lack the numbers to make the difference in most major cases before the court. This seems to be why Sotomayor and Jackson are lashing out in the way that they are. For the first time in a long time, their side is on the losing end, and they simply can’t stand it.