Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's Thread about Justice Jackson

The following thread written by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was posted on Bluesky on July 9, 2025. Because it's important to democracy, I thought I would post it here.

Sheldon Whitehouse's Bluesky Thread:

What's up with Justice Jackson? She started making her mark and speaking out early, and some of her dissents are so pointed Kagan and Sotomayor don’t even join them. The far right is out for her, and even Republican justices are getting snarky. So what's up? Here’s my take

One of the internal traditions of the Court is “collegiality.” First, you’re there for life, so you may as well get along. Second, issues come and issues go, and an ally in one case is an opponent in another. Third, the Court thinks of itself as a stately institution, hence decorum matters.

All of which is well and good — in ordinary times. It’s akin to members of Congress calling each other “the distinguished gentleman” or the “distinguished gentlelady,” to maintain decorum and avoid events like the caning of Senator Sumner.

But what if we’re not in ordinary times?

What if we are in a time when a billionaire-funded scheme has spent decades trying to pack the Court with billionaire-agreeable justices, so as to “capture” the Court in the sense of “regulatory capture” or “agency capture” — and what if the billionaires have finally succeeded?

What if we are in a time when a billionaires’ gifts program has given certain justices ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’ and they have reciprocated with favorable rulings?

And sheltered behind the weakest ethics review of any court in the land whenever the gifts program is challenged?

What if we are in a time when favored parties and litigants win victories with statistically astounding regularity? And justices are feted at organizational fund-raising dinners where those statistically-astounding winners convene?

What if we are in a time when novel judicial doctrines, reverse-engineered for happy results for certain special interests, are grown and fertilized in special-interest-funded legal hothouses and then make their way through the Court to become the law of the land?

What if flotillas of secretly-funded amici curiae appear before the Court and sing in conspicuous harmony, and win with conspicuous frequency, and the Court makes little to no effort to enforce its own rules about amicus disclosure about their financing and coordination?

These are all unseemly things to discuss, indecorous, and not at all “collegial.” But if they are true, should they not be discussed? How much mischief happening in plain view in the courthouse should a justice ignore in the interest of “collegiality”?

Justice Jackson has begun looking at patterns, and noticing what types of parties tend to win, and which tend to lose. She has noticed procedural discrepancies.

She has begun looking at interests, and motives, and connections. She’s begun to point behind the curtain at what “collegiality” obscures.

What if a colleague uses your “collegiality” as a strategic tactic, like a pick on a basketball court, deliberately for advantage? Surely, the coin of collegiality has a flip-side obligation to behave in such a way that your colleague’s collegiality is never abused.

KBJ comes from the district and circuit courts, where many judges are concerned about the mischief surrounding the Supreme Court. It’s happening in plain view. Judges are not idiots.

Their discretion, decorum and “collegiality” have limits — and should have limits. Truth and candor are also judicial virtues.

Jackson may have come to the Court sharing those obvious concerns. If so, she had a running start on noticing the mischief. She may choose not to look at the Men in Black Neuralyzer and disappear the awareness she brought of the mischief at the Court. Nor should she.

If it would be unseemly for a gentleman or gentlelady to call out a colleague for having their hand, or their friends’ hands, in the gentleman’s or gentlelady’s pocket, is it not worse to have put that hand in the pocket in the first place?

To rely on another’s “collegiality” to hide one’s own mischief isn’t fair play.

If the Emperor has no clothes, and chooses to walk down the Main Street of the city, it may very well be indecorous to call him out as buck naked. But the real wrong in that scenario is in the naked parade down Main Street, not in the call that points the nakedness out.

The far right is undeniably twitchy, because the participants know the Scheme better than anyone. The points Jackson has made so far about patterns and preferences and predisposition likely only touch the surface of a far deeper problem.

The Schemers have much more to fear, and they know it. As best I can tell, KBJ is being true to herself, true to her oath, and true to her native land. That’s my take, anyway. (P.S. Harlan was alone in dissent, too, and that aged well.)