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erronis

(21,463 posts)
Sat Oct 4, 2025, 10:51 AM 3 hrs ago

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is trying to warn us about something. Are we listening?

Last edited Sat Oct 4, 2025, 12:17 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/oct/04/justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court

Jackson enters her fourth year on the supreme court on Monday. As its fiercest liberal voice wary of Trump’s growing power, she faces an intense battle ahead

Her sharpest words were not in the body of her opinion. They were tucked away in a footnote.

. . .

The footnote in question can be found in Trump v Casa, the June ruling that gave a big boost to Donald Trump by clipping the wings of federal judges and limiting their use of nationwide injunctions to block the president’s worst excesses.

Over 21 pages of taut dissent against Casa, Jackson decried the 6-3 ruling as “an existential threat to the rule of law” and a “sad day for America”. The ruling was “profoundly dangerous”, she wrote, because it gives Trump permission “to wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate”.

Looking ahead, she added the decision would “surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise”.

This is strong medicine. But then there is footnote No 5, which takes her dissent to another level entirely.

. . .


Edit to add link to the text of the footnote - thank you, dweller.
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000197-b1f0-db52-a3b7-b1fdf7120000

Page 111 of 119 for footnote 5
(Her full dissent starts page 98 )
9 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is trying to warn us about something. Are we listening? (Original Post) erronis 3 hrs ago OP
GOP loves it, these Nazis love it and the Supreme Court is gonna destroy us completely Eliot Rosewater 3 hrs ago #1
See dweller 3 hrs ago #2
Thank you. erronis 3 hrs ago #4
She's trying. The majority on that court are morally bankrupt. themaguffin 3 hrs ago #3
Great article!! CrispyQ 2 hrs ago #5
The only resolution is to pack the court. Gimpyknee 2 hrs ago #6
The Guardian continues... Hekate 2 hrs ago #7
Thank you for posting this KT2000 2 hrs ago #8
KBJ is very brave Bobstandard 1 hr ago #9

Hekate

(99,674 posts)
7. The Guardian continues...
Sat Oct 4, 2025, 12:27 PM
2 hrs ago

QUOTE
…In (footnote number 5) she cites The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jewish labor lawyer who fled the Nazis in 1938. Fraenkel’s book analysed how the Nazis had created two coexistent legal systems.
There was the normative one that kept the economy of Germany running as usual. And then there was the separate legal system that operated alongside it, in which anyone deemed an enemy of the regime was stripped of all rights and subjected to arbitrary violence.
In the footnote, Jackson quotes The Dual States’s description of the way unchecked power is incompatible with the rule of law:

See E Fraenkel, The Dual State, pp xiii, 3, 71 (1941) (describing the way in which the creation of a ‘Prerogative State’ where the Executive ‘exercises unlimited arbitrariness … unchecked by any legal guarantees’ is incompatible with the rule of law)

The footnote is three and a half lines of small print. But its import is booming.
By citing Fraenkel’s work, the justice is drawing a parallel between the drift in jurisprudence that is taking place under the combined actions of Trump and the supreme court, and the legal structure of Nazi Germany.
END QUOTE

Bobstandard

(2,031 posts)
9. KBJ is very brave
Sat Oct 4, 2025, 12:45 PM
1 hr ago

She must wonder, will the Trumpists subject me to house arrest, jail me, or worse? Assasination seems to be a right wing fad so that must be on her mind. And yet she persists.

KBJ, ladies and gentlemen, is a true American.

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