Now trying to stop myself from obsessing over ACB’s criticism of KBJ while saying nothing still about her criminally compromised Conservative colleagues.
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Right!?! She’s sitting next to the jurisprudence equivalent of rapists and murderers, and she’s criticizing KBJ’s table etiquette.
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She’s tone policing a fellow Justice. Hmm.
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Pretty soon, that will be the number one result for a Google search, and then people will start to believe that it’s not a Constitutional Amendment, just a ‘custom’, and thus can be changed without fanfare.
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Crosspost to Fall of the Fourth Estate? Because that is some journalistic malpractice right there.
Congress debated whether the citizenship clause of the 14A was even necessary, because birthright citizenship was already a given, and once slavery was abolished, there would be no legal reason to exclude former enslaved people.
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Except the Dred Scot decision was still, technically, good law as it hadn’t been overturned. The 14th Amendment effectively overturned the Dred Scot decision, among other things. And arguably the most important other thing was extending due process protections to the states. At the time, most of the Bill of Rights only constrained the federal government from violating people’s rights, not the state government.
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It’s not “despite”SCOTUS’s ruling. It’s consistent with it, as they explicitly said a class action suit would be the way to protect everyone.
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Reuters is getting roasted in the comments for that stupid headline, including by Ken White.
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Good. They should be getting roasted. That’s an egregiously bad take.
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I think they mean the “longstanding custom” of respecting the Constitution. No worries, that is on the way out as we speak.
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Justice Jackson on writing dissents: “I’m not afraid to use my voice”
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/11/justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-democracy-dissents
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Good! Somebody needs to speak up about the corruption on the right in the court and how it warps the court’s decisions.
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Another day, another instance of “what the actual fuck?”
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So what if an act of Congress created that agency? Congress. Pfft. They’re not even real. /s
In all seriousness, this is a baffling ruling. I don’t mean baffling in the sense of not understanding where this is coming from. I mean baffling in understand just exactly how they’re justifying this legally. I know it’s just a ruling on the injunction and not on the merits, so they don’t have to provide a justification, but this is just . . . it’s against everything I learned about Constitutional Law in law school and that I’m reviewing right now for the bar exam. They are upending everything that undergirds our entire legal system. They are enabling a true dictatorship, in every sense of that word, to form.
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From Sotomayor’s dissent:
When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it. Two lower courts rose to the occasion, preliminarily enjoining the mass firings while the litigation remains ongoing. Rather than maintain the status quo, however, this Court now intervenes, lifting the injunction and permitting the Government to proceed with dismantling the Department. That decision is indefensible. It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave. [emphasis mine]
This is what I mean about upending everything that undergirds our entire legal system. Sotomayor is right. This decision is indefensible. It really is.
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The only quibble I have is that she pulled her punches. Neither willfully blind nor naive. Straight up bad faith: republicans have been trying to kill the DoE since integration. Constitution be damned!
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