“One of these things is not like the others/One of these things just doesn’t belong.”
Jackson played football while her friends played basketball, hung upside-down while her friends stood right-side up, and smoked cigarettes with Maria Rodriguez while her friends innocently recited numbers with The Count.
This week, the court’s newest justice wrote a 14-page dissent to a two-paragraph ruling embraced by eight of her colleagues. The case involved an executive order that directed the executive branch to streamline its workforce through efficiency and attrition. A government employees’ union sued, and found sympathy in the Ninth Circuit Court. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a rare 8-1 decision, slapped down that West Coast court. (RELATED: SCOTUS Paves the Way for Trump to Act on Campaign Agenda)
Jackson dissented, “What one person (or President) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer’s prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner’s chance to breathe free from black lung, or a preschooler’s opportunity to learn in a safe environment.”
That sounds more like a convention speech than a courthouse opinion. Policymakers, not judges, decide the right amount of resources to allocate to schools and such. But when the judiciary imagines itself as a legislature, the consequence is that its language moves from Legalese to Wonkish — and even Politicianese.
“In my view,” Jackson wrote, “this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground.”
What does any of that, including the “happening on the ground” cliché, have to do with the constitutional powers of the executive? (RELATED: Ketanji Fatigue)
“In my view,” she wrote, “this decision is not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless. Lower court judges have their fingers on the pulse of what is happening on the ground and are indisputably best positioned to determine the relevant facts — including those that underlie fair assessments ...