CNN NewsNight anchor Abby Phillip interviewed liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday and repeatedly tried to get her to attack her colleagues, first as sexists and second for undermining public confidence in the Court by overturning “precedent,” by which she just meant Roe v. Wade.
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The interview with Phillips was just the latest stop on Jackson’s book tour, which Phillip referenced when she tried to get Jackson to attack her conservative colleagues again, “You write in the book about this idea of precedent, which is coming up a lot lately. You talked about how your mentor, Justice Breyer, emphasized that judges are obligated to observe precedent. This Court has overturned precedent in some very significant ways. Is there a risk that in doing so, they could lose the confidence of the public?”
Jackson replied that, “precedent is very important. It is actually one of the constraints on judicial authority that has existed since the beginning of the Court. The idea that judges have limited power… Alexander Hamilton, for example, talked about, and I talk about this in the book a little bit, is that the judiciary would not be the most dangerous branch. In fact, it would be the least dangerous branch, in part because it was constrained in certain ways. And one of them is by understanding that when you get an issue, you're not looking at it cold.”
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. Nick Kangadis
. Eric Scheiner
