Ketanji Brown Jackson addresses her slapdown to Trump ‘absolute immunity’ case: ‘Presidents are not kings’

‘The separation of powers is crucial to liberty. It is what our country is founded on’

Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson arrives to testify during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 23, 2022 (AP)

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday said her opinion stating that “presidents are not kings” reflected her view of a federal government designed to prevent tyranny by splitting the powers of a monarch among three co-equal branches.

Ms Jackson delivered the widely-cited rebuke to then-president Donald Trump in a November 2019 district court opinion rejecting claims that former White House counsel Donald McGahn could not assert absolute immunity from a subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee’s probe into whether Mr Trump obstructed former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” she wrote. “This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control. Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

Asked about her most famous opinion on the third day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms Jackson said the “design” of the US government “is to prevent tyranny”.

“The framers decided, after experiencing monarchy, tyranny, and the like that they were going to create a government that would split the powers of a monarch in several different ways. One was federalism. It was vertical, they would split the powers between the federal government and states. Another was to prevent the federal government from itself becoming too powerful from having all of the authorities from having legislative, executive and judicial authority concentrated in one place,” she explained.

“The separation of powers is crucial to liberty. It is what our country is founded on. And it's important as consistent with my judicial methodology for each branch to operate within their own sphere”.

Ms Jackson added that such a separation meant, for her, that judges “can’t make law” and “shouldn't be policymakers”.

“That's a part of our constitutional design and it prevents our government from being too powerful and encroaching on individual liberty,” she said.