Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took her conservative colleagues to task Wednesday over a ruling weakening a federal statute that prevented public officials from receiving bribes in the form of gratuities.
In her dissent, Jackson issued a brutal smackdown of the majority opinion, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who read the statute as a ban on all “gratuities,” meaning gifts including lunches, plaques, and gift cards. Kavanaugh and the other conservative justices ruled 6–3 that the responsibility to regulate gratuities should rest with state and local governments.
Jackson wrote that the ruling relied on an “absurd and atextual reading of the statute” that “only today’s Court could love.”
She argued that the ruling had ignored the plain text of the statute, which targeted officials who “corruptly” received bribes and gratuities “intending to be influenced or rewarded,” and that the court had instead decided the statute did not criminalize gratuities at all.
“The Court’s reasoning elevates nonexistent federalism concerns over the plain text of this statute and is a quintessential example of the tail wagging the dog,” she wrote.
Instead, Jackson argued, determining the exact extent of the statute should be handled by Congress, “not in the pages of the U.S. Reports.”
Jackson is the latest liberal justice to express frustration with the high court’s sharp rightward turn. In recent weeks, Justice Sonia Sotomayor has repeatedly used her dissents to call out her conservative colleagues for hypocrisy and encroaching on people’s rights.
