⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The Supreme Court hears Johnson versus United States Congress. Floyd Johnson is an Army veteran with service-related post-traumatic stress disorder. While serving a forty-year prison sentence for state felonies, he obtained disability benefits based on an eighty-percent disability rating. The VA later cut his payments to the amount paid for a ten-percent rating, under Section 5313. That law limits disability payments after more than sixty days' imprisonment for a felony. Johnson sued Congress in Florida, arguing that the law itself was unconstitutional. The trial court dismissed his claims as legally frivolous. The Eleventh Circuit ordered dismissal instead for lack of jurisdiction. It said Congress was immune from suit, and changing the defendant would not help because this challenge belonged in the veterans' review system. That system normally runs from the VA's Board of Veterans' Appeals to the Veterans Court, then the Federal Circuit. Section 511 restricts other courts' review of VA benefits decisions. In nineteen seventy-four, Johnson versus Robison allowed constitutional challenges to benefits laws in ordinary federal court. Congress changed the review system in nineteen eighty-eight. The question now is whether that change closed the ordinary-court route, even when a veteran attacks the statute rather than the agency's handling of a claim. This is about which court may hear the challenge, not whether the benefit cut is constitutional. Jeffrey Chen, of Bondurant Mixson and Elmore, represents Johnson. He will argue that Section 511 leaves that route open.

Johnson v. United States Congress (No. 25-735) — Supreme Court of the United States, argued October 5, 2026.