Justice Jackson, Gracing Cover of ESSENCE, Attacks ‘Narrow’ Justice Thomas for Endorsing ‘Return’ to Racist Supreme Court Ruling

The ending of the Supreme Court’s term on a note of sharp acrimony between Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson lays bare the rift between the two black justices, who are also the court’s most liberal and conservative jurists.Justice Jackson this month is profiled in ESSENCE magazine, where she is photographed on the cover of a special July 4 double issue. The spread amounts to the first magazine cover of her career. ESSENCE explains that she “represents the American Dream and serves as a powerful voice for those simply seeking the God-given birthrights promised to every American.” The magazine describes itself as the “premiere lifestyle, fashion, and beauty magazine for African-American women.”Justices Jackson and Justice Thomas, though, are fresh off a heated debate about the meaning of “birthright.” The court in Trump v. Barbara held by a six to three margin that President Trump could not end birthright citizenship. Five of the justices determined that the Constitution blocked that change, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurring with Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s liberals, albeit on statutory grounds.Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch all found that the 47th president was acting lawfully last year when he sought to abolish birthright citizenship via an executive order. The 14th Amendment mandates that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Justice Thomas, the high court’s senior justice, wrote the longest dissenting opinion of his three decades on the court — 90 pages. He reckons that the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1865, was meant “equal rights for the freed blacks” of the Civil War, but has been “repurposed” to grant citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors. Justice Roberts denounced that as a “dramatically revisionist view.”Justice Jackson’s concurrence is harsher. She writes that “Justice Thomas’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.” The phrase “second founding” was popularized by the historian Eric Foner, who argues that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments dramatically changed the meaning of the Constitution. Justice Thomas, though, rejects the “universalist approach” to the 14th Amendment that Justice Jackson borrows from Mr. Foner. Instead, he reads that clause as a specific rejection of the Supreme Court’s “odious” decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford from 1857, which held that American citizenship could not be extended to persons of black African descent. Decades later Chief Justice Charles Hughes called it the court’s “greatest self-inflicted wound.” Justice Thomes determines that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment applies only to “freed slaves such as Dred Scott,” not to today’s children of migrants. Justice Jackson counters, in a stunning accusation, that “for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision,” Justice Thomas proposes “a return to its core tenet” because according to his logic “certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship.”Justice Jackson reasons that Justice Thomas and the Trump administration, by ignoring that “our Constitution stands firmly against caste and subjugation — on all axes and in all manners” also deny the “clear, universalist vision shared and proclaimed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers: to ‘rebuild a shattered empire’” and to “plant deep and solid the corner-stone of eternal justice, and to erect thereon a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law.”Justice Thomas responds by arguing that “blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority.” As Frederick Douglass puts it, they “fought and bled in the same battles,” and “gained and gloried in the same victories.” That, in his view, is why the Amendment applies only to them, not to children of migrants in perpetuity. Justice Jackson takes another swipe at Justice Thomas when she writes that “there are myriad ways in which the Court’s adherence to color-blindness is mistaken.” That is an allusion to his 2023 concurrence in the high court’s rulings banning the use of race in university admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. Justice Thomas’s concurrence, which he — unusually — read aloud from the bench, asserted that the decisions amounted to “an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution.”Justice Thomas wrote that “all forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution.”

Justice Jackson, Gracing Cover of ESSENCE, Attacks ‘Narrow’ Justice Thomas for Endorsing ‘Return’ to Racist Supreme Court Ruling

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