It was bad enough for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson when the court’s conservatives were shredding her legal chops to pieces in published opinions. Now, even one of her fellow SCOTUS lefties is following suit.
In a decision that lifted a lower-court order preventing President Donald Trump’s administration from laying off government employees while litigation works its way through the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor got attention for having to remind Jackson — whose opinion in a universal injunctions case decided last month drew widespread mockery — that her opinion didn’t actually deal with the the matter before the court.
The case, American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump, has to do with whether or not reductions in workforce initiated by the executive needed to go through the Merit Systems Protections Board, which protects federal employees from politically motivated firings.
However, that’s not what the litigants were before the nation’s highest court to decide. Instead, Tuesday’s decision involved whether or not the executive could go through with the layoffs while the case percolated through the system. According to The Washington Post, the decision was 8-1 in favor of allowing the administration go through with the planned layoffs.
You get no points for guessing which liberal justice didn’t side with the conservative majority in overturning the lower-court’s decision.
In her one-woman dissent, Jackson said that Trump “sharply departed from that settled practice” by initiating the reduction in force and said the court, by authorizing the administration to go through with their plans, had allowed “all the harmful upheaval that edict entails, while the lower courts evaluate its lawfulness.”
I could go on, but why not just let a “wise Latina” do the work for me?
In which Sotomayor sides with the conservatives and reminds Jackson that what Jackson is talking about isn’t before the Court at the moment https://t.co/jqe7mFLTHn pic.twitter.com/DUzRLUECPE
— Sunny (@sunnyright) July 8, 2025
“I agree with [Jackson] that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates. … Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force ‘consistent with applicable law,’” Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion.
Is Ketanji Brown Jackson the worst justice on the Supreme Court?
“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law. I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance.”
I’ll translate that into layman’s terms: That’s not even what we’re talking about, you moron.
This would be extraordinary even if it didn’t come after a similar judicial thrashing late last month in the court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, a case which limited the ability of lower-court justices to issue universal injunctions. The three liberal justices who voted against the majority probably regret letting Jackson pen the dissent in a 6-3 ruling that has become the source of endless mockery for the Biden appointee; she lamented that the case used “legalese” (I was under the impression that’s what the Supreme Court dealt in), threw in a snide “… (wait for it) …” in the middle of a paragraph to emphasize that she’s sarcastic and sassy, and asked (I hope hypothetically) what a martian might think of the U.S. Constitution.
The smooth-brained, drool-soaked, crayon-chewing DEI poster child known as Ketanji Brown Jackson actually put the phrase “wait for it” in a SCOTUS dissent
She learned to write like this at Harvard, and graduated with top marks pic.twitter.com/kOh8VB62W7
— Noble Brown🗡 (@Sociopathlete) June 27, 2025
An underappreciated passage of Justice Jackson’s dissent in CASA is her appeal to the authority of a fictional space alien. pic.twitter.com/IEzqHgIn7j
— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) June 28, 2025
Oh, my! It’s worse than I thought.
The opening paragraph of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Trump v. CASA actually does use the word “legalese.” Moreover, she calls the legal question before the court “a mind-numbingly technical query.”
It’s a basic job duty of a SCOTUS… pic.twitter.com/bSNjNWbRCl
— Russell T. Warne 🇺🇸🇨🇱🇮🇱 (@Russwarne) June 28, 2025
In her opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett leveled Jackson in as few words as possible, noting that “[w]e will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent,” cited Marbury v. Madison — essentially the case that established the Supreme Court’s purview, for those of you as ignorant of history as Justice Jackson is — and noted that, in her dissent, she “decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
In her majority opinion for the Supreme Court nuking universal injunctions, Amy Coney Barrett also juked Kentanji Brown Jackson from orbit.
“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent, not to mention the… pic.twitter.com/je6FsoXxCi
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) June 27, 2025
But that’s Barrett. She’s a Republican appointee, after all.
What does it say when even Sonia Sotomayor has to remind Justice Jackson to decide the case before her, not the case she wants to decide?
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