Skye Graham writes for the Federalist about an interesting new analysis of US Supreme Court partisanship.
A new Wall Street Journal analysis found that Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most partisan justice on the Supreme Court, voting against the Trump administration 98 percent of the times in 100 major cases. In those same cases, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas aligned with the administration 89 and 88 percent of the time, respectively.
The Wall Street Journal suggested in its article that Alito’s record was the real story behind this data: “In a term dominated by Trump-related disputes, [Alito] voted to uphold every significant Trump initiative that came before the court, and he wrote frequent, full-throated endorsements of some of Trump’s most brazen efforts to expand presidential power.”
Alito is certainly a consistent conservative justice, but Jackson sides against the Trump administration in almost every major case, according to the WSJ’s analysis. The real story this data tells is about Jackson’s radicalism, which sometimes even causes her to split with her left-wing counterparts on the court.
Jackson has shown her radical positions time and again, and that doesn’t just apply to cases in which the administration presented arguments. In Chiles v. Salazar earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado cannot ban therapists from offering patients alternatives to pursuing radical “transgender” ideology. In this 8-1 decision, Jackson was the sole dissenting justice.
The majority, which liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joined for this ruling, said that Colorado’s ban was violating therapists’ right to free speech. Jackson, however, said these were standard, “garden-variety” medical regulations, supposedly aimed at protecting patients.
This was not Jackson’s only time writing a lone dissent. After a 6-3 decision where the court found a Louisiana districting map unconstitutional, the court voted 8-1 to hand the decision down immediately. As the sole dissenter, Jackson said her colleagues “[dove] into the fray” of elections after they voted to fast-track the decision’s release.
