Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is so consistently scathing in her rebukes of President Donald Trump that the administration has tried to get around her as much as possible. Yet despite Jackson’s well-known antipathy toward the president’s policies, one legal expert worries that his dissent in a recent Supreme Court case in favor of 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 lawyer Marc Elias wrote in his Democracy Docket newsletter that “because federal law prohibits mass voter removals in the 90 days before Election Day,” Justice Jackson says, the ruling “will likely have minimal impact in the short term, as states will conduct at most individualized voting.” electoral lists using the modified SAVE system.
He continued: “Let me start by saying that I agree with Judge Jackson: federal law prohibits mass voter purges in the run-up to an election, and only individual evictions are permitted. I also agree with her that even these individual expulsions pose concrete harm to legal voters and undermine free and fair elections.
However, despite this point of agreement, Elias characterized Jackson as ignorant of relevant recent history.
“The conservative justices added that they would consider the scope of the silent period in a separate case scheduled for debate later this year, and that ‘we need not decide here,'” Elias wrote. “In this case, Republican National Committee against Mi Familia Votathat the Court will hear in December, the RNC, backed by the Trump Justice Department, argues that Arizona could cancel the registrations of voters it considers non-citizens during the 90-day silent period.
He added: “Simply put, Judge Jackson’s ‘good side’ depends on whether state and local Republican election officials follow federal law, and whether the Supreme Court will take firm action if election deniers attempt to purge voters.”
He concluded: “If past is only prologue, the signs are not encouraging. »
Jackson has made other recent attempts to downplay the negative implications of his conservative peers’ behavior. On Sunday, she also said they were not abusing the shadow role, which allows them to express opinions without explaining their reasoning, as often as before.
“I think it’s a good and positive development,” Jackson said, noting that “now the public as well as the lower courts, who are charged with the responsibility of understanding what the court is doing and applying to some extent the court’s principles in future cases, really need a way to do that.”
She added: “And this was not possible before, in a world in which the court provided no explanation. »
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