Justice Ketanji Br own Jackson dissented strenuously with a Supreme Court ruling that, in part, upheld the Trump Administration’s request for an emergency stay of a lower court’s blocking of NIH from canceling $783 million worth of grants.
The money part of the woman’s (dare I use that term on a person who doesn’t know what a woman is?) dissent:
the high court’s way of preserving the “mirage of judicial review while eliminating its purpose: to remedy harms.”
No. Not at all. The purpose of judicial review is critically—and solely—to ensure that the action before it, along with the statute(s) involved, follow the text of our Constitution and the text of those statutes. Nothing more and nothing less.
But the woman wasn’t done with shredding (to use the in-vogue term) “judicial review” [emphasis added]:
It would have been much simpler for the Court to just announce that, regardless of the plain text of the APA or what Congress intended to authorize, we no longer accept that the Government’s grant-termination decisions are subject to arbitrary-and-capricious review or that vacatur of an arbitrary grant-termination decision is an available remedy.
The greatest harm that is in play here is ruling on the basis of a particular judge’s or Justice’s personal definition of “harm.” Yet, this is exactly what Jackson presumes to attempt with her setting aside the petty text of a statute from which her august self demurs.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, including Jackson’s dissent can be read here.