On June 29, 1914, the day after the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Austrian interrogations confirmed — to the satisfaction of Gavril Princip’s interrogators and their government, anyway — that the Serbian state was behind the assassination. Serbia denied involvement.
Thus continued the series of events that led to “The Great War,” now known as “World War I.”
Today’s “Thought” (see below) features Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett dismissing fellow Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. This passage from Justice Barrett’s write-up of the Trump v. CASA decision has been shared a great on social media since it came down yesterday.
The whole passage is worth reading (see links here), and may demonstrate some tension on the court. In social media, much has been made about the . . . sportive . . . or political . . . or even “catfight” . . . element of it all, or as a sign that Jackson is a “DEI hire” etc. But the actual decision is of no small moment, and worth reading.
The Epoch Times offers “five takeaways,” with the summary in the blurb: “By limiting the ability of judges to issue universal blocks, the court’s ruling is expected to affect other cases contesting Trump administration policies.”
“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” Barrett said. “Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.”
A key aspect of Barrett’s opinion indicated that broad relief was not necessarily bad but depended on who the plaintiffs in particular cases were. Courts, she said, could issue orders designed to provide “complete” relief for the parties before the court rather than other individuals in similar situations.
“No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law,” Barrett said. “But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.”
Note that this quoted passage follows immediately after the oft-shared swipe at Justice Jackson.
Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who penned her own dissent, expressed their disagreement with Barrett and her majority opinion colleagues.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor said. She added that while birthright citizenship might be under threat today, “tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
Because the majority decision limited relief to parties before the court, it rendered “constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit,” Sotomayor said.
Jackson, meanwhile, described the majority’s decision as “an existential threat to the rule of law.” Her separate dissent suggested that Barrett had focused too much on history and not enough on broader and more basic principles, like whether the judiciary can stop unlawful behavior.
In multiple portions of Barrett’s majority opinion, she and her fellow justices leveled criticisms of Jackson’s dissent.
At one point, Barrett said that Jackson’s position was “difficult to pin down.” After briefly discussing Jackson’s dissent, Barrett adds that the majority “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.”
The Epoch Times article ends with Barrett’s most generalized critique of Jackson’s dissent, where she says that Ketanji Brown Jackson’s position “would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.”
And this might be the biggest ideological takeaway. Progressives (which are what Jackson and fellow justices Sotomayor and Kagan most obviously are) have relied heavily on court rulings to advance their political agenda. They tend not to win on their issues through majority vote of the people. For good or ill, many of the major “progressive” achievements, such as regarding de-segregation and abortion, were achieved largely on the basis of key Supreme Court cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade.
More recently, Democrats have relied heavily on injunctions of the lesser federal courts to “stop Trump.”
The ruling in Trump v. CASA limits this tactic somewhat.
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. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s argument in Trump v. CASA (June 27, 2025), as quoted by Jonathan H. Adler, Volokh Conspiracy (June 27, 2025).
On the 28th of June in 1914, 19-year-old Gavril Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and the Archduke’s wife Sophie. The Archduke had earlier missed a bomb thrown at his car, which necessitated a change in the motorcade route, which the driver forgot, which is why the car paused at the precise intersection in which Princip fired his fatal shots.
The shooting began a series of events that led to “The Great War,” now known as “World War I.”
Some reformers, seeing the program as an over-complicated mess, yearn to “simplify” it by providing medical care as a “free” federal program. Others, concerned about the dangers of centralization and the obvious incompetence of bureaucracies far removed from taxpayers, advise collapsing Medicaid completely back to the states, to be organized and funded locally.
In this context, the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday allowing South Carolina to remove Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program is instructive.
“The majority opinion in the 6–3 decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch,” explains Matthew Vadum in The Epoch Times. “The new ruling reverses a federal appeals court decision that blocked South Carolina from excluding Planned Parenthood from the program.”
The key issue in the litigation regards a supposed right to choose medical providers: South Carolina, by dropping Planned Parenthood, was alleged to be abridging the right of recipients to choose their medical providers.
Remember that choosing your doctor was falsely promised by President Barack Obama in his medical insurance scheme — so, obviously, the option is highly valued by Americans. But is it a “right”?
“New rights for some mean new duties for others,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, elucidating a basic principle of legal philosophy.
Applying the idea of rights to government handouts (in which taxpayers are on the hook) is a recipe for disaster.
Applying federalism, on the other hand, makes not only constitutional sense, but — because the states are closer to both taxpayers and those in need — Common Sense.
I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is unworthy of a profound intellect to see in mediocrity itself an objection. It is, indeed, a necessity of human existence, for only in the presence of a horde of average men is the exceptional man a possibility. . . .
Friedrich W. Nietzsche, as quoted and translated by H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1913), from The Antichrist (Der Antichrist, § 57).
In 1556 on the 27th of June, the thirteen Stratford Martyrs were burned at the stake near London for their Protestant beliefs.
In 1844, on this date, Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his brother Hyrum Smith were killed by a mob at the Carthage, Illinois, jail.
Paul von Mauser was born on June 27, 1838, and would go on to become a weapons designer. Other June 27th birthdays include Emma Goldman, born in 1869, to later become known as a feminist, anarchist and early leftist opponent of Soviet Communism; and Helen Keller, born in 1880 — and she, too, was an anarchist “of the left.”
This is not good news, as Mr. Drigotas explains. “In that case, Bryan Bowers had asked the Justices to review a ruling from the Supreme Court of New York that allowed Utica city officials to take land on which he had a contract to build and give it to a different private corporation for a separate construction project.” Mr. Bowers had “hoped to stop government officials from using force to pick winners and losers in the construction industry.” But it was a no go.
Politicians and bureaucrats love to grab other people’s property, under cover of “the public interest.” But their “public interest” is nothing more than a thin disguise for helping some individuals (often contributors to politicians’ campaigns) at the expense of others.
“With their denial of Bowers, Justices continued to show support for one of the most hated and notorious decisions to come out of their lofty chambers: that of Susette Kelo v. New London, Connecticut,” explains Drigotas. The Kelo case, often mentioned here, remains the ruling precedent, the government’s license to steal. Its loose construction of what can be regarded as in “the public interest” is a big part of the problem.
Sadly, the courts have so far refused to rein in government eminent domain abuse. And voters have little sway upon the judiciary. And our representatives, our first line of defense, have also declined to stand up for basic justice and decency.
What to do? Remember that your representatives will soon be on the ballot.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols. . . . we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.
Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (1933).
On June 26, 363, Roman Emperor Julian was killed during the retreat from the Sassanid Empire. On this same date in 1960, Madagascar gained its independence from France; in 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.