Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson openly expressing “concern” about the High Court’s recent presidential immunity ruling shows that progressive justices are in a “weak position,” according to legal analyst Harry Litman.
In a decision handed down on July 1, the Supreme Court ruled that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution of alleged crimes that take place while performing certain official acts, siding partially with former President Donald Trump in his quest to quash all of his recent legal troubles.
Jackson and her two fellow liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan, dissented from the decision, while all six conservative justices voted in favor. In a new interview with CBS News, Jackson said that she felt that the decision gave Trump unwarranted special treatment in criminal matters.
“I was concerned about a system that appeared to provide immunity for one individual under one set of circumstances, when we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same,” Jackson said during the interview, which aired in part on Tuesday.
Alex Wong
Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, argued in a post to X, formerly Twitter, that although Jackson’s remarks were less blistering than her written dissent, her “unusual” decision to discuss the matter in a televised interview indicated that the court’s liberal minority was struggling.
“On the one hand, justice, Jackson’s expression of ‘concern’ over the immunity decision is no more, in fact, a fair bit less, than she said in her dissent,” wrote Litman. “On the other hand, it’s quite unusual to make it in that forum and a sign of how weak a position the 3 progressives are in.”
On the one hand, justice, Jackson’s expression of “concern” over the immunity decision is no more, in fact, a fair bit less, than she said in her dissent. On the other hand, it’s quite unusual to make it in that forum and a sign of how weak a position the 3 progressives are in.
— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) August 28, 2024
Newsweek reached out for comment to a Supreme Court spokesperson via email on Tuesday night.
In her written dissent of the immunity decision, Jackson warned that presidents could be “exempt from legal liability for murder, assault, theft, fraud, or any other reprehensible and outlawed criminal act,” as long as they claimed their actions were “official acts.”
“Stated simply: The Court has now declared for the first time in history that the most powerful official in the United States can (under circumstances yet to be fully determined) become a law unto himself,” Jackson wrote.
“For my part, I simply cannot abide the majority’s senseless discarding of a model of accountability for criminal acts that treats every citizen of this country as being equally subject to the law—as the Rule of Law requires,” she added.
The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling may have wide-reaching implications on multiple criminal proceedings against Trump, although the former president’s convictions on 34 felony counts in New York stand intact and two other felony cases are still pending.
Earlier on Tuesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment in Trump’s federal election subversion case, complying with the decision by retooling the document to remove references to Trump’s official communications with the Department of Justice.