The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Friday in litigation over education-related grants, splitting 5-4 with Republican appointees in the majority. Chief Justice John Roberts and the three Democratic appointees dissented.
The administration had asked the high court to halt a Massachusetts federal trial judge’s order that, the Justice Department wrote, “requires the government to immediately reinstate millions of dollars in federal grants that had been lawfully terminated.”
The court granted the government emergency relief in an unsigned opinion on Friday. The majority halted the district court order pending appeal, reasoning in part that the states arguing against the federal government in this case “have represented in this litigation that they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running. So, if respondents ultimately prevail, they can recover any wrongfully withheld funds through suit in an appropriate forum.”
But in one of the dissents, Justice Elena Kagan called the majority’s decision a “mistake.” She wrote that the federal government didn’t even defend the legality of canceling the grants at issue. “And contra the per curiam [majority opinion], the respondent States have consistently represented that the loss of these grants will force them — indeed, has already forced them — to curtail teacher training programs,” she wrote.
In another dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the majority’s “eagerness to insert itself into this early stage of ongoing litigation over the lawfulness of the Department’s actions — even when doing so facilitates the infliction of significant harms on the Plaintiff States, and even though the Government has not bothered to press any argument that the Department’s harm‐causing conduct is lawful — is equal parts unprincipled and unfortunate. It is also entirely unwarranted.”
Joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson noted that the high court doesn’t “ordinarily exercise jurisdiction over TROs [temporary restraining orders], and this one is no different.” She added that the federal government hasn’t “articulated any concrete harm it will suffer if the grant terminations are not implemented in the next three days.”
Roberts did not write his own dissent, but rather the opinion simply reflects a notation that he would’ve denied the application.
The appeal stemmed from the administration’s decision to terminate grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. “Yet the district court’s order is enabling many of those grantees to request payments on their grants, which grantees now have an incentive to do quickly,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the March 26 application.
She highlighted an example of a grant that, she wrote, “funded a project that involved a ‘racial and ethnic autobiography’ that asked whether individuals ever ‘felt threatened? marginalized? privileged?’ and how they would ‘seek to challenge power imbalances.’” Another, she wrote, “sought to ensure that teachers were ‘purposeful in implementing cultural and SEL [social-emotional learning]/DEI practices with fidelity.’”
The appeal came as the Trump administration seeks to dismantle the Education Department. It also represented just one of the administration’s several recent complaints to the high court about lower court judges running amok in the administration’s view. Harris wrote that the case “exemplifies a flood of recent suits that raise the question: ‘Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever)’ millions in taxpayer dollars?”
She was quoting from Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent from the court’s March 5 refusal to help the government avoid paying nearly $2 billion in foreign aid funds for already completed work. The court split 5-4 in that case, and the administration wants to flip that dissent to a majority as it presses a series of urgent appeals in the early days of Trump’s second term.
Friday’s decision therefore represents at least a temporarily significant victory for the administration. Whether it reflects an outlier or the start of a trend could become clearer with several other emergency decisions pending on immigration, employment and birthright citizenship.
Opposing the application, a coalition of states led by California wrote that the federal government was seeking extraordinary relief from the justices that it wasn’t entitled to. The states noted that the government was asking not only to halt the lower court’s temporary restraining order but also to summarily overturn it.
In addition, the states accused the government of taking its problems with other cases out on this one.
“It appears that defendants’ real concern is not with this case or the courts below; it is with other cases in other ‘forums across the country’ where courts are grappling with a raft of legal disputes arising out of recent actions by the Executive Branch,” the states wrote, citing the administration’s application and adding: “Those concerns are properly litigated in the context of those other cases.”
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