https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a71072715/scotus-shadow-docket-john-roberts-conservative-majority/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=69fb901688fbbd00010ffeb9&utm_campaign=trueanthemFBESQphoto&utm_content=69fb901688fbbd00010ffeb8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwdGRleARpgCpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeC96tP8zcnhZwK_Cy53Gatp2Q_vrhwzRiJVTmS8tmWhircBx4RIyXl7AQ9e4_aem_AYovr9ZgqrMNe6t5t-adig


> Over the weekend, The New York Times published a trove of personal memos from the members of the Supreme Court outlining the court's promiscuous use of the so-called shadow docket. It has become the carefully constructed conservative majority's favorite work-around to kill policies it doesn't like and support causes that it and its corporate patrons do.

> The report is an astonishing leak of private communications between the justices. It bespeaks a court at war with itself, completely out of the control of Chief Justice John Roberts. The best evidence of the latter contention is the fact that Roberts emerges from these memos as a complete hack. The Times traces the invigorated shadow docket back to when Roberts used it to block an environmental program from President Barack Obama.

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For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation, relying on written briefs, oral arguments and in-person discussions. The justices composed detailed opinions that explained their thinking to the public and rendered judgment only after other courts had weighed in.

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But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan's lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning. At the time, the ruling seemed like a curious one-off. But that single paragraph turned out to be a sharp and lasting break.

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That night marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court's modern "shadow docket," the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.

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This is where Roberts comes in.

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In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama's plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. "I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical," he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was "the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector," and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

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Chief Justice Balls 'n' Strikes seems a bit confused. He's not supposed to care about the economic impact of a presidential initiative. He's only supposed to decide whether the initiative itself is constitutional. And, in any case, it's an issue that deserved to be debated by the full court in open session.. .. ..