Some 42 million Americans depend on government-provided food to survive, and the reality as of Sunday is that the food will not be available to most of those people this week.  That is an undeniable, even if temporary, situation that may not be fixed unless the government’s prolonged shutdown ends.  Today is the shutdown’s 40^th day, a record.

Who caused that situation?  The news headlines since Friday night have put the blame on the Supreme Court and, specifically, on one Justice – Ketanji Brown Jackson.  She chose to act on her own in granting a request by the Trump Administration to postpone lower court orders requiring full funding of the food program.

Popularly known as the food stamp program, because that is the mechanism used by eligible families to obtain fiod from retail stores, it goes back to 1968 but had earlier versions as far back as 1939 as a way to distribute farm crops to needy families during the Great Depression.

The situation today in the program is not due to Justice Jackson alone; she had reasons that were legally technical and short-term and did not reflect a personal desire on her part to let people go hungry.  One of the Court’s most liberal Justices, she surely would have not wanted that.

The fact is, though, that her order did have the practical effect of stopping much of that food supply.  In direct response to her order, the Agriculture Department (operator of the program) sent out orders on Saturday to state agencies to withdraw any authorizations they had sent out for full food stamp availability.  The order does allow continuation of some partial permission to accept stamps.

Others in Washington have a share of the blame for the situation:

• Congress has yet to pass an annual funding bill to pay for the food under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), available to low-income households, totaling about 42 million individuals.
• President Trump has said he would not allow even temporary funding unless the government shutdown is ended, but he had no ordered the Agriculture Department to halt the partial availability of food.
• The Justice Department, the agency that asked for the order that Justice Jackson issued, has argued that the government cannot shift $4 billion from an emergency fund into the SNAP program, because that money would have to come from the separate program that provides school lunches to some 29 million students every day. If the money is shifted from that program to SNAP, the Department argued, there is no assurance Congress would replenish the school lunch fund.

The SNAP program costs $9 billion a month.  As the current controversy reached the Supreme Court in a Justice Department appeal last Friday, a federal judge in Rhode Island had ordered the government to shift $4 billion by the end of that night to the SNAP program to fund it for the month of November.  (The government has stressed that, even if it had to do that, it would not be enough; only Congress, is said, can fully fund it.)

Justice Jackson was drawn into the controversy on Friday because she is the Justice with basic responsibility for emergency matters coming from the geographic area that includes Rhode Island.  She was asked by the Justice Department for a single order: put the Rhode Island judges’ orders on hold until the Department can challenge them in a federal appeals court.

That is what Jackson did, and only that.  Her intention, she said, was to act for only a brief period; she noted that the appeals court had said it would act on the dispute “as quickly as possible,” so she blocked the orders for an immediate $4 billion transfer to SNAP.  Her two-page order contained an implied hint to the appeal court to hurry, noting that it was expected to act “with dispatch.”

Jackson specified that her order would not last more than 48 hours after the appeals court acted.  If that court upholds the Rhode Island judges’ full funding orders, even temporarily, the Trump Administration very likely will return to the Supreme Court.  At that point, Justice Jackson may share the duty of responding with the full Court.  Her Friday order had the effect of keeping the controversy unfolding on a schedule she preferred. There is no doubt she had the authority to do so, since such temporary emergency orders are often handled by a single Justice.