New Supreme Court Justice

Albuquerque NM

Description

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson may not have a long paper trail of distinctive federal court opinions for her Supreme Court resume, but she does have one flashy ruling that liberals love: Her savaging of former President Donald Trump’s sweeping claims of executive privilege. Jackson, nominated for the Supreme Court by President Joe Biden on Friday, will undoubtedly change the high court’s makeup as its first Black woman justice. But legal experts say that when it comes to assessing whether she will shift the court ideologically, the jury is still out. Jackson’s backers say they’re confident she’ll be a reliable and forceful liberal voice on the Supreme Court, although there isn’t a whole lot in her rulings over nine years on the bench that reflects an identifiable judicial philosophy. But a key factor buoying liberals is the relish — and flourish — with which Jackson took on Trump in a couple of high-profile cases during her time on the district court in Washington. When the House’s lawsuit seeking to enforce a subpoena against former Trump White House Counsel Donald McGahn was randomly assigned to Jackson in 2019, the consensus among court watchers was that Trump was likely to be fileted. What emerged from Jackson was an 118-page jeremiad that did not mince words in dissecting Trump’s claim that his advisers had an absolute right to ignore Congressional subpoenas at his direction. “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Jackson wrote, dismissing the longstanding argument as “a fiction” and “a proposition that cannot be squared with core constitutional values.” Beyond that decision and another in which Jackson blocked the Trump administration from expanding the use of expedited deportation proceedings, there are few rulings with clear political overtones. “There’s very little there that can legitimately be characterized as radical. She’s a judge who takes pains to find and apply the law in an evenhanded manner with a balanced tone,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin a constitutional law scholar and dean of the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.