Jackson vs. Jackson

What's worse than mayo? "AnthonyHatesMayo" thinks the "notorious" KBJ (c'mon—you know this is coming) is worse.

Editor’s note:

“AnthonyHatesMayo” (Anthony Lucido—we’re still working on getting his proper byline working here on Substack’s rigid format) returns with a rewrite of Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s dissent in the universal injunction case.

—Steve

Jackson v. Jackson

By Anthony Lucido

DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES v. CASA, INC.

JUSTICE JACKSON, dissenting. Vehemently.

I agree with every word of JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR'S wise dissent, much of which derives from her LatinX heritage. And I even more agree with the precedential email I just received from Lawrence Tribe, voted most esteemed constitutional scholar by the ABA twelve years in a row. In it, he holds that "[T]he lawless, rapacious, obsequious majority has just unleashed the 1,000 year Reich. The mass deportation, via repurposed Trump, Inc. sewage tankers, of every American who came here seeking a better life or reads the New York Times will now begin. Indeed, a black Trump zeppelin is hovering over my solarium." Just so. See also Palsgraf, at 14 (holding that Trump's imperial presidency was not foreseeable and thus there can be no proximate cause for any deportations, ever.)

But I write separately to emphasize a key, conceptual point: the men who wrote our constitution on parchment produced by conscripted Egyptian laborers were old, white, be-wigged, patriarchal slave masters with no knowledge of Tik Tok, diversity or penumbras and emanations of social justice. Accordingly, the Executive's bid to vanquish these principled, narrowly tailored universal injunctions is, at bottom, a request for the Court's permission to exercise Article II powers which are a nullity, having been invented and foisted upon an indentured and battered citizenry by pasty, fundamentalist Baptist racists.

When the Government says "do not allow a single, forum-shopped, Obama-appointed federal judge in Hawaii to usurp the Executive's constitutional authority and override the will of 77 million American citizens," what it is actually saying -- nay, demanding -- is that the Executive should be permitted to do very bad things, things universally denounced by venerated institutions like the Washington Post editorial board, Ta Nehisi Coates and the Pritzker Foundation for Synthetic Intersex Human Reparative Justice, whenever the Executive wants. This cannot stand.

The Framers, even though they were misogynists who made women wash their burlap clothing and trifoil hats all day on the flat rock down by the creek in Salem, did establish a white supremacist system of checks and balances. This means, in practice, that when there are wise, noble and enlightened Executives, working for the common good, standing athwart the right side of history and yelling "Progress!" they are entitled to deference under longstanding principles of, inter alia, federalism, stare decisis and the Rule in Shelly's Case. Conversely, when the Executive, as here, is an adjudicated felon forty seven times over, who grabs birthing people by their regions of most private bodily autonomy and stands credibly accused of being a Russian asset, every presumptively invalid order must be reviewed and, after applying a neutral balancing test, rejected as malum in se.

Tragically, the majority shuns the prescient warning of Kamala Harris, the first Vice President of Color in our nation's history. "When we imagine what can be, and are unburdened by what has been, the coconut tree of liberty is freshened and preserved. Or, it sometimes dies, holistically. The choice is ours and theirs, collectively."

The Majority has chosen poorly.