Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is ‘mad as a bag of cats’ over SCOTUS ruling says Republican senator: ‘That’s a good thing’

U.S. Senator John Kennedy, R-La., praised the Supreme Court’s Friday ruling that blocks nationwide injunctions, potentially paving the way for President Donald Trump‘s plans to eliminate birthright citizenship and other executive policies.

The 73-year-old lawmaker said he was “proud” of the 6-3 decision from the conservative majority of the court, which limited lower courts to injunctions for any said policy only in a plaintiff’s jurisdiction.

“The Supreme Court has turned the universal injunctions into fish food, as well it should have,” Kennedy told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner. “There’s no basis in statute. There’s no basis in Supreme Court precedent. There is no basis in English common law for universal injunctions.”

He added, “Judges who just dislike what Congress and a president, any president, has done, just made them up. And good riddance.”

Kennedy then called out Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who decried the majority’s ruling in a fiery dissent.

“It’s a very extensive ruling. You can tell it from Justice Jackson’s dissent,” said the senator. “She’s mad as a bag of cats, and that’s probably a good thing for the American people.”

In her 22-page dissent, Justice Jackson warned, “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.”

America’s first Black female Supreme Court justice writes that the Trump administration’s request to the court to “vanquish” universal injunctions is “at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to “engage in unlawful behavior.”

The plaintiffs in the three consolidated cases sought preliminary injunctions against Trump’s enforcement of his executive order denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented individuals living in the United States. However, Friday’s SCOTUS ruling does not provide a judgment on the legality of the order–only on the administration’s emergency request to narrow the scope of nationwide injunctions issued by lower court judges.

Nationwide injunctions have blocked many executive actions taken by U.S. presidents over the years, including President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program and President Barack Obama’s guidance requiring institutions to allocate bathroom accessibility based on a person’s gender identity rather than biological sex.

Doing away with nationwide injunctions sets a dangerous precedent, cautioned Justice Jackson.

“When the Government says ‘do not allow the lower courts to enjoin executive action universally as a remedy for unconstitutional conduct,’ what it is actually saying is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution—please allow this. That is some solicitation,” she writes.

Jackson argues that “everyone is contained by the law” and that there should be “no exceptions.”

“And for that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law—full stop,” she said. “To conclude otherwise is to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law’s protection become subject to the Executive’s whims instead.”