CNN pundit Scott Jennings called out Supreme Court "hack" Elena Kagan for flip-flopping on nationwide injunctions.
In a talk at Northwestern University three years ago, Kagan said, "It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks."
And yet, when the Supreme Court put an end to the plague of nationwide injunctions that she criticized just three years ago, Kagan joined the court's other two liberals in a scathing dissent.
While the case centered on Trump's executive order targeting birthright citizenship, the court did not rule on the merits of that action. But the ruling was a seismic victory for Trump, whose agenda has been repeatedly held up by lower court judges issuing nationwide injunctions.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's sophomoric dissent, and the majority's pithy response, received significant media coverage.
Jackson's glib indifference to "legalese" was widely mocked, with the majority accusing Jackson of sidestepping an actual legal analysis to enforce her own views embracing an "imperial Judiciary."
"We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote.
While judicial supremacy has been a pain for Democratic and Republican presidents alike, the hubris of district court judges has been a particularly bad problem for Trump, who has already been hit with 25 injunctions since January.
While she did not write her own opinion, Kagan co-signed the dissents from Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.
“It is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more,” Jackson wrote.
The unhinged response from the Supreme Court's liberal wing was clearly influenced by the fact that Trump is the current U.S. president, as Kagan's blatant hypocrisy makes all too clear.
When Joe Biden was in office, Kagan rightly criticized the absurd practice of letting unelected judges wield sweeping authority over the nation and its policies. But now that President Trump is back, she's changing her tune.
“I was trying to sort out my feelings on this matter, and I came up with a quote from a very smart lawyer, and I just want to quote it, because I think she was right when she said it, ‘It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks,'” Jennings said on CNN’s Saturday Morning Table for Five.
“Justice Elena Kagan in 2022 said that, of course, when we had a Democratic president. Now she voted against the decision on Friday,” the conservative commentator continued. “Just goes to show you that some of these folks really are hacks.”
“I’m glad they went ahead and fixed it because it’s not right that one of these individual district court judges can act like a king or a monarch and stop the elected president from acting,” Jennings added.
