The Outsider Perspective Issue 451 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Except to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies, who is having to delete a lot of pictures of himself on Instagram after people caught him using Photoshop to make himself look better. The edits weren’t even well done because the walls, benches, and anything he was near were abnormally warped.

The Sun noted of Jefferies, “The politician was captured hanging out on the street and leaning on a bench, and captioned the post ‘home sweet home.’ But a closer look reveals that the bench behind Jeffries’ hip area is noticeably warped. The bench slats appear to have been edited as he manipulated his waist to make it look thinner.”

Put another way, the House Minority Leader had to delete thirst trap photos of himself from the internet. I love the Internet age.

This week, I’ll be going through the Supreme Court and how it has shifted this term – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Trump uses USDA to block China from buying up U.S. farmland. A new rule will prevent Chinese nationals from purchasing large tracts of farmland. There are many reasons for pushing such a law, but the recent Israel/Iran war provides a stark example. The Israeli Mossad set up secret drone factories and workshops inside Iran that allowed them to strike more quickly than anyone could have imagined. China likes touting its drone technology, and one of the concerns is that U.S. farmland would give the Chinese a similar foothold in America (particularly with some of that land near military bases). I’d look for these kinds of fights to escalate in the coming years. China is receiving the full Soviet treatment. 20th-century Americans would have been shocked if the Soviets were buying American land; China is no different now.
Brennan and Comey are under investigation for criminal charges. I have no idea where the criminal investigations into former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan will go. I’m less confident anything will happen with Comey. However, it wouldn’t be challenging to prove James Brennan lied to Congress under oath, as Jerry Dunleavy lays out. Whether that charge has any teeth remains to be seen.
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Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.

Lies and Conspiracy Theories Dominate Texas Floods – Conservative Institute

Congress Should Hold Judges Accountable For Blatantly Bad Rulings – Conservative Institute

America’s Growing Liberal Domestic Terrorism Problem – Conservative Institute

The Supreme Court Is Over Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

We’re at the end of another Supreme Court term, and retrospective pieces are starting to appear. There are many interesting notes on the new coalition blocks forming for this version of the Roberts Court. But perhaps the most startling thing is how out of place Ketanji Brown Jackson is on the Court.

In short, she’s taking heat from both the liberal and majority wing. I say majority wing because the shots that Barrett lobbed at Jackson in the CASA case were the kind of things I’ve not seen in a majority opinion in a long time. Additionally, Sotomayor even pointed out Jackson was over her skies in a recent decision.

It’s one thing to have radical views. Any justice can have those, liberal or conservative. I’m a conservative and have sympathies with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. However, they understand how to work within the confines of the Court and have an appreciation for the role of a Supreme Court Justice, similar to everyone else on the Court.

It’s not clear that’s true of Jackson.

Charles C. W. Cooke summed this up nicely:

Perhaps you think I am being unfair to Jackson? If so, I would draw your attention to the criticisms that have been leveled at her during just the last two weeks. In a decision released on June 27, Justice Amy Coney Barrett felt obliged to chideJackson for having penned a dissent that was “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself”; for having ignored “conventional legal terrain” in favor of issuing “a startling line of attack” that was not “tethered . . . to any doctrine whatsoever”; and for having denigrated the work of the majority opinion and the principal dissent as “boring ‘legalese'” that was obsessed with a “mind-numbingly technical query.” On July 8, Jackson’s ideologically sympathetic colleague, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined the fray, chastising Jackson for having written a fiery dissent that had nothing whatsoever to do with the question that had been brought before the Court. “I agree with Justice Jackson that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” Sotomayor wrote, before noting calmly that:

Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force “consistent with applicable law,” App. to Application for Stay 2a, and the resulting joint memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management reiterates as much. 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.

Jurisprudentially, Justices Barrett and Sotomayor do not have a great deal in common. In both cases, though, the message being conveyed is clear: We hear cases and controversies; we are limited to the facts before us; and, when formulating our response, we are obliged to make comprehensible arguments. That this rebuke has been delivered to Jackson twice in a fortnight — from both the careful Barrett and the partisan Sotomayor — is extremely telling.

Before the end of this term, I’d never have considered Barrett an elbow thrower. And I’d never expect Sotomayor to throw shade at Jackson or the liberal wing. Cooke is right, though. Jackson is rubbing colleagues the wrong way by being called out in this manner and has no answers for any issues raised.

When Kavanaugh was appointed to the Court, I was frequently asked why he was important. The reason was this: coalition building. Kavanaugh was critical because he would help build a coalition that moved Roberts back to the right. It’s not always enough to nominate ideology. You have to think through the dynamics of the Court, which Trump’s team (and Leonard Leo) did their homework on.

Amy Coney Barrett is also proving instrumental in this regard. In effect, there are three groups: The majority (Roberts, Barrett, Kavanaugh), the conservatives (Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas), and the liberals (Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson). But Jackson is so radical that she’s shifting to the left of even Sotomayor in ways that not even Sotomayor is comfortable with.

The problem for the liberal wing is that Jackson is becoming such a toxic bomb-thrower that it’s uniting the majority and conservative blocks while breaking the liberals. Remember, Barrett wrote the majority opinion scorching Jackson. That means Roberts and Kavanaugh signed off on that, no problem. That’s notable and unusual for anything Roberts agrees to have done in a majority opinion.

What’s also notable is that Kagan was more comfortable this term, joining 7-2 decisions against the liberal wing. She’s among the best writers and legal tacticians on the Court, alongside Roberts and Kavanaugh. She’s clearly a liberal, but she’s not insane. But Kagan sees it as more important to join the majority opinions than to join Jackson’s landmines.

When Kagan disagrees with you on something, you have to honestly grapple with what she’s writing. Ginsberg was in a similar vein. Agree or disagree, you had to deal with their arguments.

That’s not true of Jackson. Everyone is swatting aside her diatribes, which are disconnected from law and history, as meaningless.

It’s still early, and she could grow into the role. And I would partially blame her first set of clerks for being abysmally bad (some of her clerks came from district court judges who are in the process of getting demolished by appeals courts and the Supreme Court for bad rulings against Trump/the executive branch).

But if Jackson continues down this path, she’s choosing the loneliest carer of all: the dissent that no one even bothers with. If that’s true, Biden’s legacy for the Supreme Court will be the worst among all modern presidents.

It’s something to watch the Biden legacy collapse this hard just six months into Trump’s second term.

Quick Hits:

Where you can find me this week

The Supreme Court Is Over Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Links of the week

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

Satire of the week

Thanks for reading!