Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took up verbal arms against fellow Justice Brett Kavanaugh over the Supreme Court’s willingness to rule on emergency requests from President Donald Trump, which Kavanaugh defended as being on par with its handling of the Joe Biden administration.

Speaking at an event attended by lower court judges and lawyers in Washington on Monday, Brown disputed Kavanaugh’s claim that the court has treated Trump and Biden similarly when it comes to the court’s emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket.

“This uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved with cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem,” she said, according to CNN and The Washington Post. “I think it is not serving the court or our country well at this point.”

Kavanaugh argued that the court had previously approved several policies the Biden administration had brought through the emergency docket, such as maintaining access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

“This is not a new phenomenon in the Trump administration,” he said, according to the Post.

Jackson retorted that most of the Biden administration’s legal wins ― including in the mifepristone case ― simply upheld the legal status quo, while the rulings in favor of the Trump administration have resulted in major policy changes.

“What is happening now is the administration is making new policy, but then insisting that the new policy take effect immediately before a challenge about its lawfulness is determined,” she said.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called the court's willingness to rule on emergency requests from President Donald Trump "a real unfortunate problem."

via Associated Press

Emergency applications are filed for the Supreme Court to rule on a case without it fully passing through the lower courts and ordinary procedures. Most of the applications involve routine matters, such as time limit extensions or efforts to maintain the status quo pending final action by the court, the Supreme Court’s website explains.

According to a count by the Brennan Center for Justice, the Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration’s emergency applications 80% of the time, usually without oral arguments and with little or no explanation.

Given its high success rate, the Trump administration has been rapidly filing applications for emergency relief, resulting in the court issuing 30 emergency orders in cases related to Trump’s second administration as of last month. That’s 11 fewer cases than the total it issued during Trump’s first four years in office.

By comparison, the Biden administration filed just 19 applications for emergency relief, and the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations combined filed only eight applications over 16 years, according to an analysis by Georgetown professor Stephen Vladeck.

Kavanaugh blamed gridlock in Congress for forcing presidents to do more through executive orders, which he said he isn’t a fan of.

“None of us enjoys this,” he said, according to The New York Times, while arguing that the justices are required to “grant or deny” any application they receive.

Fellow justices have similarly spoken out against what they describe as Trump’s misuse of the shadow docket, with Justice Elena Kagan taking aim last year at how it expanded Trump’s executive power after his successful firing of federal workers without cause.

“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,” she wrote in a dissenting opinion. “Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”