A spokesperson for the Justice Department said yesterday that they will appeal the injunction imposed by Judge Royce Lamberth on stem cell research, and Sen. Tom Harkin announced that he will hold hearings on the issue.
The administration will ask the U.S. Court of Appeals to lift the preliminary injunction issued on Monday, Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
Current research worth about $131 million can go ahead, but research proposals being evaluated for potential funding will be "pulled out of the stack," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said.
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he was calling a hearing for Thursday on the matter.
"This ruling should be appealed and I fully believe that it will be overturned. Embryonic stem cell research offers hope to millions of Americans who are suffering from debilitating and life-threatening diseases, and it must be allowed to proceed," Harkin said in a statement.
The appeal should be on strong grounds, with precedent on the side of the government. The Supreme Court's landmark Chevron v NRDC clearly articulated the Court's deference to government agencies in interpreting statute. Think Progress's Ian Millhiser explains.
Under Chevron v. NRDC, judges are normally supposed to defer to an agency’s reading of a federal law unless the agency’s interpretation is entirely implausible, and the Obama administration quite plausibly read the Dickey-Wicker Amendment to only prohibit federal funding of the actual destruction of an embryo — not federal funding of subsequent ESC research.
Indeed, Lamberth’s decision moves the law to a worse position than it was during the Bush administration. President George W. Bush allowed federal funding for research on existing embryonic stem cell lines, but would not allow new lines to be created. [Monday's] opinion even forbids such entirely uncontroversial research.
This means that Lamberth is essentially refusing to defer to the readings of three administrations and their implementations of statute. Yes, Lamberth not only goes beyond what the Bush administration did in its stem cell research restrictions, but beyond the Clinton and Obama administrations, too. In the meantime, "Current research worth about $131 million can go ahead, but research proposals being evaluated for potential funding will be 'pulled out of the stack,' National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said."