Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor bow their heads during inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is so consistently scathing in her rebukes against President Donald Trump that the administration has tried to go around her whenever possible. Yet despite Jackson's well-known antipathy toward the president's policies, a legal expert is concerned that her dissent in a recent Supreme Court case favoring the president still underestimated the full scope of what he might try to do to steal the 2026 midterm elections.
Describing how the Supreme Court recently issued a ruling making it easier for Trump to purge voters he claims are non-citizens, elections attorney Marc Elias wrote for his Democracy Docket newsletter that "because federal law bars mass removals of voters in the 90 days before Election Day, Justice Jackson argues, the ruling 'will likely have minimal short-term impact, as States will at most conduct individualized voter-roll maintenance using the modified SAVE system.'"
He continued, "Let me begin by saying that I agree with Justice Jackson: federal law prohibits mass voter purges close to an election, and only individualized removals are permitted. I also agree with her that even these individual removals pose concrete harm to lawful voters and undermine free and fair elections."
Despite this area of agreement, however, Elias characterized Jackson as ignoring relevant recent history.
"The conservative justices added that they will consider the scope of the quiet period in a separate case scheduled for argument later this year, and that 'we do not need to decide it here,'" Elias wrote. "In that case, Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, which the Court will hear in December, the RNC, backed by the Trump Justice Department, argues that Arizona may cancel the registrations of voters it deems noncitizens during the 90-day quiet period."
He added, "Put simply, Justice Jackson's 'bright side' depends on Republican state and local election officials following federal law, and on the Supreme Court holding firm if election deniers try to purge voters."
He concluded, "If the past is prologue, the signs are not hopeful."
Jackson has made other recent attempts to downplay the negative implications of her conservative peers' behavior. On Sunday, she also claimed they are not abusing the shadow docket, which allows them to issue opinions without explaining their reasoning, as often as they used to.
"I think it is a good and positive development," Jackson said, further elaborating that "because now, the public and also lower courts, who are charged with [the] responsibility of understanding what the court is doing and applying to a certain degree the court’s principles in future cases, really need some way to go about doing that.”
She added, “And it was not possible before in a world in which the court was not providing any explanation.”