Sharing a stage, Justices Jackson and Kavanaugh spar over Supreme Court orders favouring Trump

The Supreme Court is photographed, Feb. 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)

WASHINGTON — Sharing a stage, Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh sparred Monday over the many emergency orders the court has issued allowing U.S. President Donald Trump to move ahead with key parts of his agenda.

The setting was extraordinary, a federal courtroom filled with legal luminaries, including the federal judge singled out by Trump after blocking part of the president’s immigration crackdown.

Kavanaugh, 61, and Jackson, 55, sat a few feet apart in a courtroom in which they both heard cases when they served on the federal appeals court in Washington. They were separated only by a federal judge who asked questions of them both. The occasion was an annual lecture in memory of a former federal judge and prosecutor, Thomas A. Flannery.

Trump appointed Kavanaugh to the high court in 2018. Jackson moved up from the appeals court in 2022, appointed by former president Joe Biden.

The issue in emergency appeals is whether a policy that has been challenged in court should be allowed to take effect while a legal case that could last for years continues.

Jackson, a frequent dissenter from the emergency orders, said Kavanaugh and the other conservatives who repeatedly sided with Trump last year were not serving the court or the country well.

“The administration is making new policy ... and then insisting the new policy take effect immediately, before the challenge is decided. This uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved in cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem,” Jackson said to loud applause.

The court is “creating a kind of warped” legal process by intervening in an early stage of a case and essentially predicting the outcome before arguments are fully developed, she said.

The Justice Department’s rush to the Supreme Court is not unique to the Trump administration, Kavanaugh said, explaining that as enacting legislation through Congress gets harder, administrations “push the envelope in regulations. Some are lawful, some are not.”

He said some critics of the recent orders had no objection when the justices allowed challenged Biden administration policies to take effect even as court cases were proceeding.

Many of the judges in attendance have been involved in high-profile challenges to administration policies, including U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. His clash with the administration over deportation flights to a notorious prison in El Salvador prompted Trump to call for Boasberg’s impeachment.

Also on hand was U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who ruled two days ago that Kari Lake, Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, did not have legal authority to take the actions she’s done to largely dismantle the Voice of America.

Neither Jackson nor Kavanaugh mentioned judges by name. But Jackson repeated a complaint she and the other liberal justices have made in their dissents.

“Should the Supreme Court be superintending the lower courts when they are hearing and deciding the issues?” she asked.

Kavanaugh, who joined an opinion criticizing lower-court judges for ignoring Supreme Court rulings, said the issues for the justices are often complicated and cases, close.

“None of us enjoys this,” he said.

Mark Sherman, The Associated Press