json.dumps() is much more than just making a string out of a Python object, it would always produce a valid JSON string (assuming everything inside the object is serializable) following the Type Conversion Table.

For instance, if one of the values is None, the str() would produce an invalid JSON which cannot be loaded:

>>> data = {'jsonKey': None}
>>> str(data)
"{'jsonKey': None}"
>>> json.loads(str(data))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 338, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 366, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 382, in raw_decode
    obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
ValueError: Expecting property name: line 1 column 2 (char 1)

But the dumps() would convert None into null making a valid JSON string that can be loaded:

>>> import json
>>> data = {'jsonKey': None}
>>> json.dumps(data)
'{"jsonKey": null}'
>>> json.loads(json.dumps(data))
{u'jsonKey': None}

json.load loads from a file-like object. You either want to use json.loads:

json.loads(data)

Or just use json.load on the request, which is a file-like object:

json.load(request)

Also, if you use the requests library, you can just do:

import requests

json = requests.get(url).json()