A new Wall Street Journal analysis found that Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most partisan justice on the Supreme Court, voting against the Trump administration 98 percent of the times in 100 major cases. In those same cases, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas aligned with the administration 89 and 88 percent of the time, respectively.
The Wall Street Journal suggested in its article that Alito’s record was the real story behind this data: “In a term dominated by Trump-related disputes, [Alito] voted to uphold every significant Trump initiative that came before the court, and he wrote frequent, full-throated endorsements of some of Trump’s most brazen efforts to expand presidential power.”
Alito is certainly a consistent conservative justice, but Jackson sides against the Trump administration in almost every major case, according to the WSJ’s analysis. The real story this data tells is about Jackson’s radicalism, which sometimes even causes her to split with her left-wing counterparts on the court.
Jackson has shown her radical positions time and again, and that doesn’t just apply to cases in which the administration presented arguments. In Chiles v. Salazar earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado cannot ban therapists from offering patients alternatives to pursuing radical “transgender” ideology. In this 8-1 decision, Jackson was the sole dissenting justice.
The majority, which liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joined for this ruling, said that Colorado’s ban was violating therapists’ right to free speech. Jackson, however, said these were standard, “garden-variety” medical regulations, supposedly aimed at protecting patients.
This was not Jackson’s only time writing a lone dissent. After a 6-3 decision where the court found a Louisiana districting map unconstitutional, the court voted 8-1 to hand the decision down immediately. As the sole dissenter, Jackson said her colleagues “[dove] into the fray” of elections after they voted to fast-track the decision’s release.
The New York Times reported last year about the divide between the 3 liberal justices, with Jackson being the most radical by far. As the junior justice on the Supreme Court, Jackson has been known to author her own dissents. “Sotomayor and Kagan worry that their newer colleague’s candor and propensity to add her own dissents have diluted the group’s impact,” The Times reported.
The left has historically gone after originalist justices on the court for upholding conservative principles. Threatening justices about what would happen if they overturned Roe v. Wade, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
After this March 2020 speech and the leaking of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, a man showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock pistol, hoping to murder him. Also following the leak, left-wing protestors showed up at the homes of other Supreme Court justices, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
According to Federalist Editor-in-Chief and author of Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and The Constitution Mollie Hemingway, the court’s liberal justices made the threat of violence worse by stalling the release of the decision.
Despite the evidence of the liberal justices partaking in partisan politics, Justice Jackson has accused the originalists of “partiality.” For however impartial she claims to be, her incredibly partial voting record can speak for itself.
