Supreme Court Justices’ Rift Spills Into Public

A liberal Supreme Court justice admitted she thought her conservative colleagues did “a bunch of things” that are “deeply wrong,” even as she tried to defend them from criticism that the court has become a rubber stamp for Donald Trump.

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The court last month ended a politically fraught term marked by surprisingly public—and at times personal—disputes between its liberal and conservative members.

During an annual gathering Thursday with judges and lawyers who work in the judiciary’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, liberal Justice Elena Kagan suggested the conservative majority was more loyal to a specific legal movement than to the president himself, according to The New York Times.

“Is this court very conservative? Does it do a bunch of things that are out of the playbook of the conservative legal movement that I think are deeply wrong? You know, yes,” Kagan said.

But she insisted the court was not “a puppet for the current administration.”

The justices rejected Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs, struck down his executive order ending birthright citizenship, and blocked him from firing a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, she argued.

Those decisions infuriated the president, who called the justices “fools,” “lapdogs,” and a “disgrace to our nation” after the tariff ruling.

The court, however, has mostly sided with Trump, including gutting the Voting Rights Act and greenlighting Republican efforts to rush through a mid-cycle gerrymander that could help the president maintain control of Congress at the midterms despite facing record-low approval ratings.

The conservative justices have also issued a series of emergency orders allowing the administration to carry out its policies even as lower courts have found them to be unconstitutional.

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Known as the court’s “shadow docket,” the decisions are often issued as unsigned orders with little or no explanation of the justices’ reasoning.

Kagan said Thursday that she thought the court was granting too many emergency applications, which she said created a “kind of momentum” that has led to more emergency requests being filed.

She also said she supported appointing a committee of retired judges to enforce the court’s first code of ethics, which it adopted in 2023 after ProPublica revealed decades of undisclosed luxury travel, real estate deals, and high-value gifts accepted by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

The justices disagree about how or whether the code of ethics can be enforced, preventing any conclusions from being reached, Kagan said Thursday.

It was just one of several disagreements that have boiled over between the justices this year.

Just days before the term concluded on June 30, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor signaled her staunch disapproval of one of the conservative majority’s decisions by reading her dissent from the bench, prompting an outburst from Alito that shocked veteran court watchers.

Alito also raged over a dissent from liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who blasted the court’s handling of mid-cycle redistricting over concerns that the justices could appear politically motivated.

And in April, Sotomayor took the highly unusual step of apologizing to conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh after she suggested that his ruling allowing immigration agents to question people based on their ethnicity, language, or place of employment was out of touch with reality.

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