Justice Jackson accuses Supreme Court of ensuring Trump ‘always wins’ in scathing dissent
Jackson warns Supreme Court’s NIH ruling favors Trump and threatens biomedical research.
By Ashley Oliver Fox News
Published August 22, 2025 12:02pm EDT
Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson criticized on Thursday what she said were the "recent tendencies" of the Supreme Court to side with the Trump administration, providing her remarks in a bitter dissent in a case related to National Institutes of Health grants.
Jackson, a Biden appointee, rebuked her colleagues for "lawmaking" on the shadow docket, where an unusual volume of fast, preliminary decisionmaking has taken place related to the hundreds of lawsuits President Donald Trump’s administration has faced.
"This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins," Jackson wrote.
The liberal justice pointed to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of Calvinball, which describes it as the practice of applying rules inconsistently for self-serving purposes.
Jackson, the high court's most junior justice, said the majority "[bent] over backwards to accommodate" the Trump administration by allowing the NIH to cancel about $783 million in grants that did not align with the administration's priorities.
Some of the grants were geared toward research on diversity, equity and inclusion; COVID-19; and gender identity. Jackson argued the grants went far beyond that and that "life-saving biomedical research" was at stake.
"So, unfortunately, this newest entry in the Court’s quest to make way for the Executive Branch has real consequences, for the law and for the public," Jackson wrote.
The Supreme Court's decision was fractured and only a partial victory for the Trump administration.
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