The Division Between Liberal Supreme Court

A pair of fascinating articles have been revealed over the last week detailing the problems the liberal faction of the Supreme Court has encountered in working together to accomplish a lot of something. We on the best are often left questioning how Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will disappoint on varied essential instances, and we assume the liberals will vote in lockstep. As it seems, the three liberals appear to have very different concepts on how they need to proceed as a minority. The articles are At the Supreme Court, Liberal Justices Are Split – The New York Times which The New York Times paired with The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices – The New York Times. One is a deep dive into reporting on the Supreme Court, and the other is an in-house interview with that reporter.

This is the best way that the NYT’s Jodi Kantor describes the dynamic.

Justice Kagan, appointed in 2010 to be a diplomat and strategist, is succesful of punching arduous, but she exhibits her frustration only in flashes. When the court rejected President Biden’s pupil loan cancellations in 2023, she deleted the most heated materials from her dissent, I discovered in my reporting. Justice Jackson goals straight at the best facet of the court, accusing them of being clueless about racism, favoring “moneyed interests” and enabling “our collective demise.”

This has led to rigidity — between Jackson and the 2 senior liberals, and between Jackson and the remaining of the court.

…

[Sotomayor] is now the senior liberal, assigning dissents and retaining many of the most important ones for herself. In those, Sotomayor disagrees forcefully, but she also values her long relationships at the court, people close to her say, and principally retains her focus on the legal judgments.

Kagan, according to the reporting, is an mental and dealmaker. Her champion on the Court was the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who did not agree with her but revered her mind and work ethic. When a conservative bolts to the liberal facet of a choice, the individual who lured them there may be more than probably Kagan.

Sotomayor is a results-oriented justice. She does not care so a lot about the law and precedent as she does about influence. But she is a believer in the establishment and has close personal relationships with some of the conservative justices.

The hero of the story is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The jurist who received the job had two Harvard levels but also a historical past of difficult energy. In 1990, when Justice Jackson was an undergraduate, she wore black instead of crimson to the Harvard-Yale soccer recreation to take a stand against a lack of full-time professors in the Afro-American research division. “We can embarrass the university in front of the alumni,” she told The Boston Globe at the time.

As a clerk, she labored at a Supreme Court with a lot of Black building staff but where only a handful of Black attorneys had reached the elite legal apprenticeship. Later, she labored as a public defender — a consultant of the accused and the shunned.

Her appointment as the first Black feminine justice was “a refutation of past ignominies, a long-anticipated and highly celebrated national achievement,” she wrote in her memoir. But inside the court, she was the junior justice, assigned to duties like serving on the cafeteria committee and answering the door to the justices’ personal convention room in case of a knock. In those conferences, Justice Jackson spoke only after the others, which means that unless there was a tie, she had the least affect.

The interview makes it clear that the junior justice always has the duties in the last paragraph, but the article pairs it with the “refutation of past ignominies” nonsense to practically make it appear as though she is being singled out for demeaning duties.

It is the conflict between Barrett and Jackson that crystallizes the distinction between Brown, her liberal colleagues, and the Court majority.

All of this got here to a head in one case in June. In Trump v. Casa, the court restricted the facility of decrease court judges to issue nationwide rulings, in one stroke diminishing the facility of the judiciary to problem Mr. Trump. Justice Barrett wrote the 6-to-3 majority opinion. Justice Sotomayor pushed back with a full-throated dissent: “The court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the Constitution,” she wrote. Justice Jackson joined that opinion.

But she added an even more dire solo dissent. “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more,” she wrote, and signed off “with deep disillusionment, I dissent.” It gave the impression of a message: I’m shedding religion in the Supreme Court.

Justice Barrett hit back arduous, calling her argument “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”

Defenders argue that Brown insists on writing solo opinions that irritate her colleagues and do nothing to advance the law, thereby partaking in “public education from the bench.” 

Empirical data bear out her verbosity.

Words spoken by new Supreme Court Justices:
– Female justices spoke more than male justices.
– KBJ spoke more than all male justices mixed. pic.twitter.com/u9kWpPy6rN

— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) June 25, 2025

I’ve two parallel theories. First, she is an consideration hog. The “me, me, me” focus is clear from her Harvard commencement to her long-winded and considerably deranged opinions. Her curiosity is not educating the public on the law; it’s in educating the press on who she is and why she’s important. She is not in building a voting bloc because then she could not grandstand and acquire “brave and bold” op-eds.

My second idea is the one I worry most. The Court can survive a impolite, loudmouthed, attention-seeker. What it might’t survive is somebody hostile to the establishment. For all of the criticism we stage at Chief Justice Roberts, he’s keenly conscious that the Supreme Court only features because the 2 real branches of authorities and the people respect it. Otherwise, we’re in the realm of “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” 

I believe Brown’s self-appointed function on the Supreme Court comes straight out of Saul Alinsky’s guidelines for radicals. She is just not in a collegial relationship with other justices. She is in demeaning them (see her “let‑them‑eat‑cake obliviousness” remark in the Harvard vs. Students for Fair Admissions case; BREAKING: Supreme Court Rejects Race-Based College Admissions – RedState) because people damage, not establishments. She discredits the Court as a rubber stamp for the administration (see “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins,” from APHA vs NIH; One Supreme Court Justice Has Nosedived Into Irrelevance; Can You Guess Who? – RedState). She is aware of her views cannot entice a five-vote, or perhaps even a three-vote, majority, so she assaults the motives of other justices and the equity of the method. Carrying the day is just not as important as discrediting the successful choice. 

Unfortunately, there may be no means of excising this variety of toxic pressure from the Supreme Court. We are caught with it. We can only hope that other justices get sensible to her recreation.

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