Ketanji Brown Jackson loses even other liberal justices in latest effort to back lower court power grab

Even the other liberal justices on the bench couldn’t join Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in opposing the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the federal workforce.

Jackson, calling the decision of her eight other colleagues to let Trump’s executive order directing large-scale workforce reductions take effect “hubristic and senseless,” argued in a dissent that they should have put more faith in the lower court judge.

“Consider the harms to democracy, too, if it turns out that the plaintiffs and the lower courts are right that the President is unilaterally changing the structure of the Federal Government,” Jackson wrote. “What one person (or President) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer’s prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner’s chance to breathe free from black lung, or a preschooler’s opportunity to learn in a safe environment.”

The central question is whether Trump’s executive order is a “massive restructuring” requiring congressional approval or “minor workforce reductions” consistent with current law, she wrote.

“One needs facts to answer that critical question and the District Court not only issued such preliminary findings based on actual evidence, it is also the tribunal best positioned to make that determination, at least initially,” she wrote. “Put differently, from its lofty perch far from the facts or the evidence, this Court lacks the capacity to fully evaluate, much less responsibly override, reasoned lower court factfinding about what this challenged executive action actually entails.”

Jackson wrote that it is not the Supreme Court’s role to “swoop in and second-guess a lower court’s factual findings, especially when that court has made well-reasoned, preliminary judgments on a developing record.”

While Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed the President cannot restructure federal agencies on his own, she noted the executive order simply directed agencies to create plans for reducing the workforce “consistent with applicable law.”

“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law,” she wrote.