The Biden appointee is alone again in calling out her high court colleagues.
Why Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the Supreme Court of playing ‘Calvinball’ for Trump www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...
— @jimrissmiller.bsky.social 2025-08-22T20:33:11.652Z
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court-trump-calvinball-rcna226523
The newspaper comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” had a fictional game called “Calvinball,” the rules of which are made up and constantly changing. The only fixed rule is that you can’t play it the same way twice....
In a solo opinion on the Trump administration’s quest to cut National Institutes of Health research grants, she wrote that in the court’s version of Calvinball, “this Administration always wins.”
It’s a remarkable statement from a sitting Supreme Court justice — she was clear to specify “this” administration — and not the first time that she has struck out on her own to publicly address her colleagues in stark terms.
Jackson is one of three Democratic appointees on the court, along with six Republican appointees. This was the latest example of Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan declining to sign on to some of Jackson’s strongest language. (All three Democratic appointees joined Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in the NIH matter, a case that produced a tangle of separate opinions, including Jackson’s.)
In her solo effort, Jackson described the NIH case as the “newest entry in the Court’s quest to make way for the Executive Branch.” She said it’s one that “has real consequences, for the law and for the public,” and she expressed the hope that “affected grant recipients can find a way to maintain their research studies — and their legal claims — long enough to give the Court the chance to change its mind.”
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