Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took her conservative colleagues to task Wednesday over a ruling weakening a federal statute that prevented public officials from receiving bribes in the form of gratuities.
In her dissent, Jackson issued a brutal smackdown of the majority opinion, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who read the statute as a ban on all “gratuities,” meaning gifts including lunches, plaques, and gift cards. Kavanaugh and the other conservative justices ruled 6–3 that the responsibility to regulate gratuities should rest with state and local governments.
Jackson wrote that the ruling relied on an “absurd and atextual reading of the statute” that “only today’s Court could love.”
She argued that the ruling had ignored the plain text of the statute, which targeted officials who “corruptly” received bribes and gratuities “intending to be influenced or rewarded,” and that the court had instead decided the statute did not criminalize gratuities at all.