Well, Joe Biden isn’t fading quietly into the background. Speaking at the National Bar Association gala in Chicago on Thursday, the former president reminisced about his career and his push to diversify the judiciary, singling out Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “one of the brightest lawyers I’ve ever met.”
Biden, who made history by nominating Jackson as the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s highest court, called her appointment a highlight of his judicial legacy.
“I appointed the most demographically diverse slate of judges ever in the history of the United States of America,” he said. “At the top of that list, one of the brightest lawyers I’ve ever met, Ketanji Brown Jackson.”
But Jackson isn’t just making history — she’s making headlines for her bold dissents. Earlier this week, she stood as the lone justice opposing an 8-1 Supreme Court order that allowed President Donald Trump to move forward with plans to downsize the federal workforce. Jackson, in a scathing 15-page dissent, blasted the majority for what she called a “hubristic and senseless” green light for Trump’s executive order.
“The temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture,” she wrote.
Her stance was so strong that even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the majority, made a point to publicly disagree with Jackson’s reasoning. Sotomayor acknowledged Jackson’s concerns about executive overreach but ultimately concluded that Trump’s directive — to plan “large-scale reductions in force, consistent with applicable law” — didn’t violate congressional mandates.
This battle stems from a Trump executive order signed in February requiring agencies to prepare plans for deep workforce cuts, which labor groups claim infringe on Congress’s authority.
The high court emphasized that this decision is temporary while the Ninth Circuit considers the case, but Jackson’s dissent underscores the ideological tension simmering even within the court’s liberal wing.
And as Biden touted his commitment to judicial diversity, his own record drew scrutiny. His claim that he knows “what’s worth losing an election over” rings awkward against decades of political reversals — from supporting the tough-on-crime 1994 crime bill to later apologizing for it, to flipping on the Hyde Amendment and waffling on oil drilling bans.