The Supreme Court's three liberal justices are facing a crisis of strategy and unity as the court's conservative majority continues to reshape American law. Elena Kagan, once the architect of quiet coalition-building, has spent years resisting the urge to publicly rebuke her right-leaning colleagues, reports the New York Times. Even when the court struck down President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, Kagan deleted the sharpest criticism from her dissent before publication, hewing to the institution's norms of restraint. Her approach—striving to make losses smaller or rulings narrower by winning over swing votes like Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett—has made her a sometimes-effective consensus builder.
But the arrival of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022 brought new tensions to the court's liberal camp. Jackson, far more willing to call out what she sees as the court's favoritism toward "moneyed interests" and the erosion of democratic norms, has made her dissents a platform for public warning. "I'm not afraid to use my voice," Jackson has said, and her lengthy, pointed dissents have sometimes annoyed colleagues but energized liberal legal observers. Sonia Sotomayor, the senior liberal, still seeks to maintain relationships across the ideological divide, though the Guardian notes she has been known on occasion to deliver an "acidic sermon" when she disagrees.
Jackson's outspoken style and frequent separate opinions, however, have caused concern that the already-small liberal bloc's impact is being diluted, per the Times. In the background, the court's emergency docket has allowed the conservative majority to hand President Trump a series of significant—if technically temporary—wins, further fueling alarm among the liberals. Kagan continues to win occasional victories through careful strategy, but even she's sounding more "despondent" in private, sources tell the paper. The Atlantic has more on the three liberal justices' increasingly "defiant" dissents.
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