Trump's Supreme Court allies battle his critics in rare public face-off

The Supreme Court is frequently accused of disproportionately siding with President Donald Trump in key rulings during his second term — and in a rare public appearance, a liberal dissenting judge called out one of Trump’s Republican judges.

"I just feel like this uptick in the court's willingness to get involved ... is a real unfortunate problem," said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a public debate at a Washington DC federal courthouse with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, according to NBC News. The event was moderated by Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman.

Jackson was referring to the way that Kavanaugh and his five fellow Republican judges repeated use of the “shadow docket,” or a procedure in which emergency filings to overturn lower-court rulings are granted with brief, non-detailed explanations. Because these rulings have usually sided with Trump they have created "a warped kind of proceeding," Jackson argued. By using the shadow docket, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to fire thousands of federal workers, seize control of previously-independent federal agencies and follow through on his immigration policies after they were blocked by lower courts — and without laying out their reasoning for the reversals.

"It's not serving the court or this country well," Jackson told Kavanaugh. The Republican judge replied that “the court has to act one way or another when the government or another litigant files an emergency application,” reported NBC News. “Kavanaugh noted that the increase in government applications is not unique to Trump, saying that the court also granted similar requests made by the [President Joe] Biden administration, albeit at a lower rate.”

He added, regarding the shadow docket trend, that “none of us enjoy this.” He said that “we have to have the same position regardless of who is president," an opinion with which Jackson concurred.

Since Trump’s ascension in his second term, Jackson has emerged as one of his most outspoken critics. According to an October article by The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, Jackson “has carved out a role as the 'great dissenter' and has been challenging the conservative bloc that now controls the Court. Outnumbered and outgunned by the right-wing supermajority, (Jackson) and her two other liberal colleagues have had to watch from the sidelines as critical constitutional laws that have been settled for half a century have been torn up by the very court on which they sit."

Pilkington continued, "So far, the list of casualties includes the right to an abortion, affirmative action, environmental protections, voting rights and much more."

Jackson has even previously tweaked Kavanaugh personally. In a January ruling during which Kavanaugh ruled to give immigration agents more leeway by arguing they supposedly rarely take American citizens into custody and release them quickly when they do. Citing cases to support her reasoning, Jackson included a Kavanaugh reference.

"See also Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, 606 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring) (slip op., at 4) (concluding that, under Lyons, Latino plaintiffs who were 'stopped for immigration questioning allegedly without reasonable suspicion of unlawful presence' lacked standing to seek an injunction),” Jackson wrote.

Despite Jackson’s criticisms, Kavanaugh is in some respects among the Republican judges who are least likely to align with Trump at the end of the day. Conservative Supreme Court journalist and SCOTUSblog founder Adam Feldman wrote in February that — when it comes to cases important to President Donald Trump — Kavanaugh was most likely to split from the Republican leader.

“This is perhaps not surprising,” Feldman observed, adding that of the three judges appointed by Trump the one most likely to vote with the liberals is Kavanaugh. “His liberal-majority votes in close cases are perhaps best explained less by a single subject area (as in the case of Gorsuch) than by a repeatable posture, as he appears most likely to cross over when the liberal position can be framed as institutionally stabilizing and incremental – preserving existing decision rules, cabining remedies, or avoiding structural leaps.”

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