'Trust is broken': Expert says Supreme Court walks on eggshells as dissents get 'personal'
The Supreme Court has always insisted that the justices are good friends and get along well, despite the bitter partisan nature of many of the issues they decide. But with many of the justices sniping at each other over concurrences and dissents in Tuesday's landmark decision blocking President Donald Trump from revoking birthright citizenship, that has never been deeper in doubt, court observer Dahlia Lithwick told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on "Deadline: White House."
Wallace called Lithwick's attention to the "personal nature" of what some justices were saying. "I mean, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, making no secret about how she sees the dissent. Samuel Alito is calling the majority, quote, 'wrong.' What stands out to you?"
Jackson, said Lithwick, put on "a clinic on how to do constitutional text and history and originalism and how to do it right ... but she's very clear, this is a direct response to what she thinks Justice Thomas has just gotten woefully wrong in his dissent, and in a sense, that feeling that she has to take him on on his own terms."
This sort of exchange spilling out in public is not unheard of, Lithwick continued, "but I think you're right to say, aggregated over the last few weeks ... there just seems to be a sense that trust is broken among the justices, and that there is a feeling that the skin is very thin and that everything is personal and everything is expressed personally."
Wallace then noted a passage from Jackson's concurrence, specifically calling out Thomas' double-talk in claiming the 14th Amendment was a race-conscious reparation as an argument for why it doesn't confer birthright citizenship, after he spent years tearing down every race-conscious program for minorities he could get his hands on, from voting rights to college admissions.
"She seems to be getting at something that kind of hovered over the voting rights decision as well," said Wallace. "What is this about?"
Jackson, replied Lithwick, is the closest thing the court has to a "progressive originalist" and is "very committed to the principle that if you are going to say you're a textualist, an originalist, that the meaning of the drafters of the Reconstruction amendments matters, then be true to that."
"I think that for her again, the only word I can keep using is gaslighting," she added. "That this very cramped, very forced, utterly ahistoric, utterly indefensible reading of the Reconstruction Amendments — to her, she experiences it like a wound."
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