Fill in the Blank: NYT bombshell—shadow docket’s real winner is__

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]The biggest winner of the New York Times exclusive about the Supreme Court's shadow docket is blank. So, we had this really weird story from the Supreme from the New York Times about the Supreme Court, and it was like on its face, Sarah, the story I didn't understand why it was significant until I had court watchers explain it to me. So, it was apparently about this application for a stay of the Obama administration's clean power plan from like literally 10 years ago.

[00:00:29]>> Mhm. Um but the the story was interesting, I guess, on like a couple of levels because you got to see a look behind the curtain on the shadow docket. And there there's the matter of what it showed about the court itself and theories about leaking. Can you sort of brief us on on like what the substance of the story, why it mattered?

[00:00:50]Sure. So, even though this case is 10 years old, the memos at issue were 10 years old, it was described by the New York Times as sort of the moment where the Supreme Court leaned into making big decisions that had real-world practical impact on what's known as its emergency docket, which means that if a case is something's going to imminently happen in the case of the implementation of a policy or somebody on death row or something like that, the Supreme Court is able to weigh in procedurally without hearing the case on the merits. When you have arguments before the Supreme Court, um that only happens after a lengthy process, after which the justices review a bunch of briefs, and they're really familiar with the case, and when they make a ruling on its merits docket, historically, that's had a lot more impact than rulings on the um emergency docket because that doesn't really deal with the underlying legal issues, just procedural issues. So, what happened in this case was a big decision was issued via what is called the shadow docket, and liberals are really critical of this in the current context because Donald Trump has racked up something like two dozen wins on the emergency docket when the Supreme Court is repeatedly having to step in and tell lower court judges, "No, you can't have a nationwide injunction. You can't do whatever." You can't judge a case without >> can't issue a nationwide injunction over Trump breathing wrong?

[00:02:17]>> No, but they've tried.

[00:02:18]>> Okay.

[00:02:19]>> And so, you this is such an interesting thing because the leak is very obviously in service of a liberal narrative >> Yes.

[00:02:27]>> critical of the of the shadow docket.