Outside the Beltway

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1. DK says:
   Wednesday, 18 March 2026 at 04:26

   Jackson-Kavanaugh tensions surface in candid exchange over Supreme Court ‘shadow docket’ (Fox News, 10 March)

   …Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh had a dispute over the high court’s approach to its emergency docket in a rare, candid discussion during an event Monday night…

   “The administration is making new policy … and then insisting the new policy take effect immediately, before the challenge is decided,” Jackson said, according to reports from The Associated Press and NBC News. “This uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved in cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem.”

   …Kavanaugh said presidents “push the envelope” more with executive orders because Congress is passing less legislation.

   “Some are lawful, some are not,” Kavanaugh said, later adding, “None of us enjoy this.”

   The pair spoke in a courtroom during an annual lecture honoring the late Judge Thomas Flannery… several federal judges, including high-profile ones like Judge James Boasberg, looked on.

   The Supreme Court Just Heeded One of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Sharpest Dissents (Mark Joseph Stern @ Slate, 17 March)

   On Monday, the Supreme Court did something surprising: With no noted dissents, the justices refused to let the Trump administration immediately revoke Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 immigrants from Haiti and Syria. Instead, the court allowed these immigrants to continue living and working in the United States legally while it reviews the government’s arguments that it can strip them of protections overnight.

   The justices, in other words, will decide this case the proper way—with full briefing, oral arguments, deliberation, and an opinion—rather than over the shadow docket, with little or no explanation. And hundreds of thousands of law-abiding noncitizens will remain protected from deportation in the meantime.

   No one is more vindicated by this unusual exercise of judicial restraint than Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. For 10 months, Jackson has been fighting her colleagues’ callous treatment of immigrants whose legal status was abruptly terminated by the Trump administration. At times, she has been the lone justice willing to speak out. In one extraordinary dissent, she alone castigated the conservative supermajority for its “grave misuse” of the shadow docket to privilege the “bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our government has promised them.”

   These condemnations may well have shamed the court into doing exactly what Jackson urged: resolve this dispute through the ordinary process—while maintaining the status quo for immigrants—rather than issuing another snap judgment for the administration that upends hundreds of thousands of lives.

   She’s one of Biden’s better decisions.

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