BREAKING: SCOTUS Quashes Federal District Courts’ Nationwide Injunctions, 6-3 | by Ed Morrissey HotAir

The usual three justices dissented, but Barrett took a moment out to blister Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in particular:

Rhetoric aside, JUSTICE JACKSON s position is difficult to pin down. She might be arguing that universal injunctions are appropriate even required whenever the defendant is part of the Executive Branch. See, e.g., post, at 3, 10 12, 16 18. If so, her position goes far beyond the mainstream defense of universal injunctions. See, e.g., Frost, 93 N. Y. U. L. Rev., at 1069 ( Nationwide injunctions come with significant costs and should never be the default remedy in cases challenging federal executive action ). As best we can tell, though, her argument is more extreme still, because its logic does not depend on the entry of a universal injunction: JUSTICE JACKSON appears to believe that the reasoning behind any court order demands universal adherence, at least where the Executive is concerned. Post, at 2 (dissenting opinion). In her law-declaring vision of the judicial function, a district court s opinion is not just persuasive, but has the legal force of a judgment. But see Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U. S. 255, 294 (2023) ( It is a federal court s judgment, not its opinion, that remedies an injury ). Once a single district court deems executive conduct unlawful, it has stated what the law requires. And the Executive must conform to that view, ceasing its enforcement of the law against anyone, anywhere.17

We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary. … In other words, it is unecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: [E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound bylaw. Ibid. That goes for judges too.

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Ed Morrissey.

The passage above is getting a lot of play. It does seem like a significant slap down. I blame this on Justice Jackson’s clerks. I don’t know whom she has been hiring, but she needs get four of the sharpest, hardest working and most annoying young workaholics from Harvard, Yale, Chicago, etc. to craft more persuasive opinions for her. She seems to be writing her own opinions and sadly, it shows. Lots of Justices do not write their own opinions and they do just fine and better than just fine. Rarely do Justices write their own and get considered deep thinkers — Scalia was one of these. Others write their own, such as W.O. Douglas, and are never heard from again, so embarrassing are they. Jackson should accept the fact that she’s not a left-wing Scalia (or even Kagan) and just make sure she understands what her clerks are saying even if she can’t create the arguments on her own. Whether she’s wise enough to follow this advice — Sotomayor sadly is not — I don’t know. I rather hope she’s not, since this would insure her ultimate jurisprudential irrelevance. You would need a committee of former law clerks and law professors to help make the pick.