Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Concerned Over Supreme Court’s Approval Of ‘Harmful Acts’

If you’ve spent the last year wondering how far the Supreme Court will go in allowing President Donald Trump to run roughshod over the United States’ foundational principles, you’re not alone. In fact, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has expressed concerns about how the court’s willingness to approve “harmful acts” by the Trump administration through emergency orders is damaging trust in the institution. 

According to The New York Times, Jackson made her comments during an annual lecture hosted by the University of the District of Columbia Law School focused on the university’s commitment to civil liberties. In her speech, Jackson added that the court “cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we are consistently greenlighting harmful acts” without a full hearing.

Jackson told the audience that there was “a serious concern” that the Supreme Court’s handling of its emergency docket was “having an enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect” on the federal court system.

The Supreme Court has become such a rubber stamp for the Trump administration that it’s genuinely surprising when it rules against them. I genuinely thought there was a significant chance the court would allow the Trump administration to disenfranchise one-third of voters by letting his executive order on mail-in voting proceed. 

Like clockwork, the Supreme Court did the exact thing she warned against, literally only a day after she made her remarks. AP reports that the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to proceed with building a national voter registry. 

From AP:

The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Trump administration’s revamped version of a Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. It’s a program that has drawn scrutiny for its use of voters’ sensitive personal data and its tendency to wrongly flag some eligible voters as noncitizens.

States’ use of the SAVE program is voluntary, limiting the ruling’s impact on the midterm elections. Existing law also blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, said David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He said DHS itself has admitted the data is not perfect.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who has refused to participate in the SAVE program, said the ruling will have no effect in her state because it “does not force states to change the way we run our elections.”

The court’s conservative majority ruled in favor of allowing states to use the SAVE tool, while the three liberal justices dissented. Their dissent focuses on the possibility that eligible voters will be unjustly removed from voter rolls because of registry errors. This has already happened in Travis County, Texas, where the SAVE tool flagged 97 voters as noncitizens. It was found that likely 21% of those people were legal citizens who were eligible to vote. 

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote in the dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

If there’s any upshot in this ruling, it’s that it will have little to no effect on the upcoming midterms, since existing laws prevent most states from purging their voter rolls 90 days before an election. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Red states take advantage of the tool ahead of the 2028 election. 

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