Ketanji Brown Jackson was 'throwing shade' at her colleagues in Trump hearing: expert
The Supreme Court looks poised to let former President Donald Trump back on the ballot after hearing a review of the Colorado decision banning him under the Fourteenth Amendment — but Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wants them to do it the right way.
New York University law professor and MSNBC legal commentator Melissa Murray explained to anchor Ari Melber that she wanted to put the actual purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment into their decision — and chided some of her colleagues for trying to take a lazy way out.
"Justice Jackson said if stopping insurrectionists in government is so important, then of course you would want to stop them from being the chief executive officer of the federal government, of running the whole government," said Melber, himself an attorney. "She sort of said, well, yes, but the historical emphasis at the time was on insurrectionist infiltration in the South at a local level. So it may be possible and not illogical that they didn't include the presidency."
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"Right," said former Trump lawyer Jim Schultz. "Because there wasn't really this risk — because of the national election, there wasn't a risk of someone who had been in the Confederacy and becoming a president. There was more of a risk at the congressional and local level of that happening. She focused on that. I think that's the cleaner way out, if you will, for the Supreme Court. Rather than some of the other issues, whether giving it to Congress and they end up on January 6th, the idea that, and the argument was this doesn't apply to candidate Trump, it would apply to him taking office but not becoming a candidate for president. And it's a good argument. I think it's a strong argument, but if they rely on that, we're right back in trying to define what an insurrectionist is on January 6th if we have a new Congress."
"I think that's exactly right," said Murray. "Justice Jackson was offering the court a clear off ramp that wouldn't engender clear down-the-road contingencies. But I also think she was throwing a lot of shade at her colleagues. She was the only one on the court delving into the scope and substance of the historical events that animated the Fourteenth Amendment."
"This is, on a court who seem to think that history and tradition is important, especially when withdrawing constitutional rights from women, is a put down from Justice Jackson to actually delve into the history animating the Fourteenth Amendment at a time when her colleagues were trying to get to a pragmatic way of doing it. They are selective and itinerant. They are outcome-driven. She might have been on board for the outcome but she was going to do the work."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
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