Trump's winning at the Supreme Court. Justice Jackson warns about 'troubling message'
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is on a winning streak of getting quick assistance from the Supreme Court after lower courts have put the brakes on his policies.
That's prompted one of the three liberal justices to write that the court is sending a 'troubling message" that it's departing from basic legal standards for the administration.
'It is particularly startling to think that grants of relief in these circumstances might be (unintentionally) conveying not only preferential treatment for the Government but also a willingness to undercut both our lower court colleagues' well-reasoned interim judgments and the well-established constraints of law that they are in the process of enforcing,' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote.
Jackson was dissenting from the conservative majority's decision to give Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency complete access to the data of millions of Americans kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration.
Once again, she wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "this Court dons its emergency responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them."
A district judge had blocked DOGE's access to 'personally identifiable information' while assessing if that access is legal.
Jackson said a majority of the court didn't require the administration to show it would be 'irreparably harmed' by not getting immediate access, one of the legal standards for intervention.
"It says, in essence, that although other stay applicants must point to more than the annoyance of compliance with lower court orders they don't like," she wrote, "the Government can approach the courtroom bar with nothing more than that and obtain relief from this Court nevertheless."
A clock, a mural, a petition: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's chambers tell her story
In a brief and unsigned decision, the majority said it weighed the 'irreparable harm' factor along with the other required considerations of what's in the public interest and whether the courts are likely to ultimately decide that DOGE can get at the data.
But the majority did not explain how they did so.
Jackson raised a similar complaint when the court on May 30 said the administration can revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans living in the United States.
Jackson wrote that the court "plainly botched" its assessment of whether the government or the approximately 530,000 migrants would suffer the greater harm if their legal status ends while the administration's mass termination of that status is being litigated.
Jackson said the majority undervalued "the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending."
The majority did not offer an explanation for its decision.
In addition to those interventions, the Supreme Court recently blocked a judge's order requiring DOGE to disclose information about its operations, declined to reinstate independent agency board members fired by Trump, allowed Trump to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans and said the president can enforce his ban on transgender people serving in the military.
Jackson disagreed with all of those decisions.
The court's two other liberal justices – Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – disagreed with most of them.
More: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson can throw a punch. Literally.
The court did hand Trump a setback in May when it barred the administration from quickly resuming deportations of Venezuelans under a 1798 wartime law.
Two of the court's six conservative justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – dissented.
Decisions are expected in the coming weeks on other Trump emergency requests, including whether the president can dismantle the Education Department and can enforce his changes to birthright citizenship.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Justice Jackson warns Supreme Court is sending a 'troubling message'
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