"Calvinball": Judges give rare public rebuke of Supreme Court
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Federal judges are increasingly criticizing the Supreme Court, including likening its approach to the Trump administration to "Calvinball," the fictional game without rules.
Why it matters: The integrity of the nation's high court is being questioned as its conservative majority rules in favor of President Trump in emergency docket decisions that offer very little explanation of the highest court's reasoning.
State of play: A dozen federal judges, appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, are increasingly frustrated with the Trump administration and Supreme Court undermining their authority, NBC News reported on Thursday.
- Trump's legal approach to his second term has involved numerous emergency appeals to the Supreme Court, which has handed him major victories.
- Meanwhile, favorable views of the Supreme Court are near historic lows, according to a Wednesday Pew Research report.
Driving the news: In a ruling that the Trump administration illegally froze nearly $3 billion in federal grants to Harvard, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs wrote: "It may well be that these differences would not distinguish these claims in the eyes of the Supreme Court, although that remains unclear under existing caselaw.
- "But this is not Calvinball and there are rules."
Flashback: Last month, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion that her colleagues were playing "Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist" in a ruling that allowed the administration to slash National Institutes of Health funding.
- "Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules," she wrote. "We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins."
Zoom in: The "Calvinball" reference is from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, where players "act in a self-servingly inconsistent manner," per the Oxford University Press.
- "Rules are made up by the players and changed in an ad hoc manner during play."
