Amy Coney Barrett rips Ketanji Brown Jackson over dissent in birthright citizenship case: As brutal as Ive ever seen

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett stunned veteran bench watchers Friday with a blunt takedown of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “extreme” dissent in the landmark birthright citizenship case in which the Supreme Court curtailed lower court use of nationwide injunctions.“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 Constitution itself,” wrote Barrett, the court’s second-newest justice, in a jaw-dropping rebuke of her colleague, the newest justice.“We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”Barrett had authored the majority opinion in the case, the most consequential on the docket this term, which gave President Trump a major win by limiting the power of district judges to block his actions.Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the main dissent for the left flank of the high court, which Jackson joined.But Jackson also wrote a concurring dissent that featured a heavy fixation on the potential practical ramifications of the 6-3 decision rather than grounding her argument in legal theory.“It is not difficult to predict how this all ends.Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more,” Jackson dramatically fretted at one point.“Quite unlike a rule-of-kings governing system, in a rule of law regime, nearly ‘[e]very act of government may be challenged by an appeal to law,'” Jackson wrote elsewhere.

“At the very least, I lament that the majority is so caught up in minutiae of the Government’s self-serving, finger-pointing arguments that it misses the plot.”Jackson even went so far as to dismiss the question of whether universal injunctions were provided for by the Judiciary Act of 1789 as “legalese” that “obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical sign...