Ketanji Brown Jackson Calls Out The Conservative Supreme Court Justices As Partisan Hacks

Supreme Court justices often spar in opinions, but Justice Jackson’s plain critique of her conservative colleagues is striking.

Supreme Court justices routinely trade barbs in their opinions and dissents, but it’s pretty rare for a sitting justice to plainly state that their colleagues are merely a bunch of partisan hacks. But that’s essentially what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did in her dissent in a case about President Donald Trump’s cancellation of National Institutes of Health grants.

The court’s split decision in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association on Thursday focused on whether the association, 16 states and other plaintiffs could challenge Trump’s cancellation of the grants as “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act, the law governing how executive branch agencies may take actions.

Five conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — issued an opinion on the emergency docket, without argument, that the plaintiffs can’t bring a challenge to restore the cancelled funding in federal district court, but rather must file suit in the Court of Federal Claims as a claim for monetary damages. Meanwhile, five justices — John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Barrett and Jackson — ruled that claims challenging agency action under the APA can be brought in district courts.

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The conservative majority’s decision to kick grant cancellation challenges to claims courts amounts to a “bizarre claim-splitting regime” that “neuters judicial review of grant terminations by sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief,” Jackson, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, wrote in her dissent. The conservative justices, she added, turn “a nearly century-old statute aimed at remedying unreasoned agency decisionmaking into a gauntlet rather than a refuge.”