Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan issued a majority opinion on Friday that will make it more difficult for criminal defendants to be eligible for relief under the First Step Act of 2018, a tough-on-crime decision that made for an unusual ideological split among the jurists.

The 6-3 opinion by Kagan marked a win for the Biden administration over its dispute over the “safety valve” relief in the 2018 law, which allows judges to ignore mandatory minimum sentences based on a drug offender’s criminal history. The crux of the issue in Pulsifer v. United States dealt with lower courts disagreeing about the word “and” as it is used in the bipartisan 2018 criminal overhaul and whether it indeed means “and” or whether it means “or.”

The Justice Department argued “and” in the text should be read more like “or” and disqualify defendants who have more than a certain number of “criminal-history points,” which the Supreme Court majority saw as the favorable argument.

“A defendant facing a mandatory minimum sentence is eligible for safety-valve relief under 18 U. S. C. §3553(f)(1) only if he satisfies each of the provision’s three conditions — or said more specifically, only if he does not have more than four criminal-history points, does not have a prior three-point offense, and does not have a prior two-point violent offense,” said Kagan, a Democratic appointee who was joined by Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, the only Republican appointee in the dissent, was joined by Democratic-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Gorsuch’s dissent was lengthy and, at times, included terse language about the government’s position.

“New framing or old, however, we have no business entertaining the government’s ramshackle argument,” Gorsuch wrote. “If anything, the government’s attempt at rebranding only makes matters worse for it.”

The dispute stemmed from a decision at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit that narrowed the First Step Act’s eligibility for safety valve relief, which is the exact opposite of what Congress intended the provision to do when it was first passed in 2018.

Civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, filed briefs in the case in support of maintaining the status quo under the provision, arguing that the “rule of lenity” states courts should interpret vague or ambiguous criminal statutes in favor of defendants.

The 8th Circuit found that the rule of lenity should only be applied when there is a “grievous ambiguity” and not where there is a reasonable doubt about the meaning of the statute.

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“This rule enforces weighty constitutional values,” Gorsuch wrote in his dissent.

“We resolve doubts about a criminal law’s reach in favor of lenity, too, because in our federal government only the people’s elected representatives, not their judges, are vested with the power to ‘define a crime, and ordain its punishment,’” the dissenting justice added.