Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may use the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database for voter-verification purposes. Pursuant to an executive order issued by President Trump last March, about half of the nation’s 50 states have been accessing the database to assure that their voter rolls contain only American citizens living within their jurisdictions. In June, however, Biden-appointed District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that it was unconstitutional for the DHS to share the database with states. Friday’s SCOTUS ruling granted the Trump DOJ’s request for a stay. And Justice Jackson was not pleased. AmericanCulture Books
She responded with a 12-page dissent that accused the Court’s majority of misreading both Supreme Court precedent and U.S. statutes by allowing the DHS and the White House to unilaterally expand the executive branch’s authority. Jackson’s dissent was full of cheap shots at the majority and infantile analogies such as the following: “[I]n balancing the equities, the majority only looks at one side of the scale — the judicial equivalent of expecting a seesaw with weight applied on only one side to work properly.” This was meant to refute the majority’s opinion that the judge’s ruling “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”
Appointed by former President Biden in 2022, Justice Jackson is the Supreme Court’s youngest and least experienced member. Evidently, it has never occurred to her that this calls for a certain amount of humility. Instead, she has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of its practices and her more seasoned colleagues — in written opinions as well as public speeches. Indeed, the night before the Court’s latest ruling was released, she spoke at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school where she sharply criticized the manner in which the Court manages its emergency docket. She had the audacity to advise her fellow justices to use the emergency docket less often. The New York Times reports that she added the following remarks:
“If we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively,” Justice Jackson said. “Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the court’s attention?”
The “privileged litigant” she meant was, of course, President Trump. She knows perfectly well that his Justice Department has been forced to appeal to the Court via the emergency docket because Democrat-appointed activist judges have been engaged in a judicial insurrection against the Trump administration. In case after case, lower court judges handed down nationwide injunctions against various Trump policies despite lacking any legal jurisdiction to do so. Eventually, this problem got so out of hand that the Supreme Court had to intervene. First, the Court granted the administration partial stays on a number of these injunctions because they exceeded the authority of the lower courts. Then it ruled on Trump v. CASA: ExecutiveBranch
On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., a trio of consolidated cases in which the Court limited the ability of federal courts to block federal laws and policies. The Court held that the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not authorize nationwide injunctions that reach more broadly than needed to provide complete relief to parties to a case, but left open several potential avenues for litigants to seek universal relief.
That should have put an end to the antics of these activist judges. But many simply disregarded the Court’s ruling or attempted end runs around the decision. In fact, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), no fewer than 16 nationwide injunctions were issued by lower courts in the 12-month period between June 28, 2025 and June 27, 2026. As crazy as it sounds, that is actually an improvement. During the period between January 20, 2025 and the date SCOTUS ruled on Trump v. CASA a whopping 34 nationwide injunctions were issued by lower courts. So, when Justice Jackson claims that she doesn’t know why the emergency docket has been used so much, she is lying. This is not making her friends on the Court.
Since her confirmation, Justice Jackson has earned a reputation for radicalism. Her solo dissents have provoked justified criticism from her liberal as well as her conservative Court colleagues. Some of her dissents read as if they were written in clueless social media posts. In her dissent in Louisiana v. Callais she actually accused the majority of “acting as proxies for their favored political parties.” Justice Alito angrily referred to that as “baseless and insulting.” He added that it was “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.” But this is the way Democrats of all stripes talk about the Court. If Republican voters are stupid enough to sit out the midterms and allow the Democrats to retake Congress many more KBJs will land on the Supreme Court.
