This week seems to be rife with journalistic malpractice from outlets either running with leaked and unsubstantiated material that tries and fails to put Trump administration officials in a bad light or works to erode and undermine our nation’s institutional bodies of governance.
The latest installment from The New York Times involves leaked memos from the United States Supreme Court, verified by more anonymous sources.
The Times spoke to 10 people, liberals and conservatives, who were familiar with the deliberations over the pivotal emergency order and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because confidentiality was a condition of their employment.
Amazing how one can fail so spectacularly on this basic tenet of integrity. God help us.
The papers expose what critics have called the weakness at the heart of the shadow docket: an absence of the kind of rigorous debate that the justices devote to their normal cases.
After obtaining the papers, The Times confirmed their authenticity with several people familiar with the deliberations and shared them with a spokeswoman for the court. The Times posed detailed questions to the justices who wrote the memos; they did not respond.
Nor should they.
As RedState reported in February, Chief Justice Roberts took action to secure the integrity of the court’s processes after the 2022 leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Two months later, if this latest tranche of leaked memos is any indication, it hasn’t worked. Between justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly criticizing their constitutionalist colleagues, and the legacy media’s breathlessly publishing unsourced and leaked material, soon there will not be a Supreme Court left to preserve.
Another major Supreme Court leak to a left-wing media outlet to support a left-wing narrative. Interesting. https://t.co/TiGd5X06uq
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 18, 2026
Of course, the NYT has invented a “shadow docket” scandal from the Court’s use of emergency rulings, particularly in the area of executive powers of the President of the United States.
Emergency orders based on abbreviated briefing and almost no deliberation have now become commonplace, notably in cases arising from challenges to presidential actions. Critics call this new way of doing business the “shadow docket.”
How stunning and brave. The “critics” are also nameless blobs whose opinion holds as much credibility as these leaking anonymous employees.
The New York Times has obtained those papers and is now publishing them, bringing the origins of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket into the light.
The 16 pages of memos, exchanged in a five-day dash, provide an extraordinarily rare window into the court, showing how the justices talk to one another outside of public view.
Leaking confidential SCOTUS documents confirms what was made plain by the Dobbs leak – for liberals there are no standards, only outcomes.
Leak, cheat, lie – all in furtherance of the cause.
No morals. No scruples.
— Shipwreckedcrew (@shipwreckedcrew) April 18, 2026
The leaked memos were in reference to a 2016 emergency ruling against the Obama administration on the Clean Energy Plan. From here, the NYT created an entire narrative that blocking then-President Barack Obama’s aims to save the planet was not only terrible, but rooted in Chief Justice John Roberts personal animus toward Obama.
However, the same so-called shadow docket methods employed in 2016 have been used in 2025 to issue favorable rulings on President Donald Trump’s use of executive powers. And in the NYT’s world, this is beyond the pale. The paper further claims that Chief Justice Roberts has allowed this use of shadow docket methodology to run amok, firing off emergency rulings instead of going through the court’s hallowed deliberative judicial process.
Viewed through the outlet’s TDS-riddled glasses, everything is stupid, including Supreme Court decisions. This has become incredibly tiresome.
At the time, the ruling seemed like a curious one-off. But that single paragraph turned out to be a sharp and lasting break. 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.
From this, the NYT surmises that Roberts is on Team Trump. Quite a leap.
Read More: New Report: Supreme Court Conservatives Alito, Thomas, Dig in for the Long Haul
Fresh Humiliation for SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor As She Has to Apologize to Brett Kavanaugh for Cheap Shot
In the Trump era, he and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings. By contrast, the papers reveal a court wielding those same powers to block Mr. Obama. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. warned that if the court failed to stop the president, its own “institutional legitimacy” would be threatened.
The court’s liberals pushed back, but compared with their recent slashing dissents, they were not especially forceful, mostly confining their arguments to procedures and timing.
[…]
Since that breakneck February 2016 exchange, the emergency docket has swelled into a major part of the court’s business, as the justices have short-circuited the deliberations of lower courts. The decisions are technically temporary, but are often hugely consequential.
Rulings with no explanation or reasoning, like the sparse paragraph from that February night, have become routine. The emergency docket is now a central legacy of the court led by Chief Justice Roberts.
NYT finally came to this gobsmacking conclusion:
Read a decade later, the memos suggest that none of the justices fully appreciated what they were doing: embarking on a questionable new way of operating.
So, Chief Justice Roberts and all the other justices at that time were not only partisan hacks, but they failed to fully weigh the gravity of their decisions. This comes off as elitist and patronizing on its face.
The NYT did not miss a step, burnishing Obama’s legacy while painting Roberts’ motivation in his ruling against Obama in the fact that then-Senator Barack Obama voted against Roberts’ confirmation to the Supreme Court. What rank nonsense.
The president was under enormous pressure to address the global climate crisis. He had campaigned on that promise, then for eight years as the planet heated, he failed to get major environmental legislation through Congress. With his term about to end, this was his last chance to act.
The chief justice was eager to assert his institution’s authority and to rein in Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, which he believed had sidestepped a recent ruling.
How exactly does the NYT explain the egregious 2012 Obamacare ruling where Roberts created a tax from whole cloth?
True, Chief Justice Roberts had cast the decisive vote in 2012 to save the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement. But that was approved by Congress.
Yes, that explains everything. Puddle-depth reasoning right here.
The NYT does admit that Obama’s second term was marked by him essentially going rogue, from the Dreamers to the Iran nuclear deal, to his Clean Power Plan, which was simply a climate change makeover of the entire energy sector.
The chief justice and some of his colleagues were watching warily, concerned the president was going past what the Constitution allowed him to do on his own. In a 2014 opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court warned Mr. Obama that he needed to tread carefully in setting environmental policy without congressional approval.
With the legal challenges to the Clean Power Plan rising quickly to the highest court, and media outlets like the NYT carrying water for the Obama administration on this signature climate legislation, according to the NYT’s reading of these memos, Chief Justice Roberts was decisive in his actions to expedite a ruling.
On Feb. 5, the internal correspondence obtained by The Times shows, the chief justice circulated a blast of a memo, insisting that the court halt the president’s plan.
His arguments were forceful, quick, and filled with confident predictions. The court was going to give the case a full hearing eventually, he forecast. At that point, the justices would vote to overturn the Obama plan, he said, because it went beyond the boundaries of the Clean Air Act.
For now, the chief justice contended that the court had to act immediately because the energy industry “must make changes to business plans today.”
“Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector before this court has an opportunity to review its legality,” he wrote.
It appeared that Chief Justice Roberts surmised that, if the court was able to do its normal deliberations, the court would ultimately rule against the Clean Power Plan, so a stay was in order. Frankly, this is the role of the Chief Justice, and the more conservative-leaning justices backed his play. The more liberal justices, not so much, as referenced by the response by Justice Elena Kagan.
Court action at this point in the process would be “unprecedented,” she added. She mentioned that she was inclined to find that the Obama plan was lawful, but she said the thin briefing made it difficult for her “to determine with any confidence which side is ultimately likely to prevail.”
Justice Alito issued a salvo on the same day as Justice Kagan, with neither of them addressing the other. Echoing the chief justice’s sense of insult and suspicion about the Obama administration, he wrote that the E.P.A. appeared to be trying to render the court irrelevant.
Of course, the NYT continued to color their narrative, saying Roberts distrusted the Obama administration; so, he used strong-arm tactics to create what has become what they consider a dangerous precedent.
Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.
In light of the entire climate boondoggle and Green New Scam being dismantled and debunked in real time, Roberts could practically be seen as Nostradamus for blocking the Obama administration’s plans to destroy America’s energy sector. The NYT notes that this emergency decision would be the last for Justice Antonin Scalia. Four days later, Scalia would be found dead, leaving a vacancy in the highest judicial body that would not be filled that year. Because it was an election year, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to advance President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. Despite McConnell’s terrible legacy of late and ignominious retirement from the Senate, McConnell will be forever remembered for saving the nation from a lifetime Merrick Garland appointment to the court.
The NYT further concluded that this emergency docket process is a bane to SCOTUS that has contributed to the undermining of the judicial body.
And, yeah, it’s all Trump’s fault.
Since then, even as the court’s approval ratings dropped, applications like the one it confronted a decade ago have proliferated, swamping the court’s ordinary work.
This is partly a consequence of a gridlocked Congress and presidents willing to push the boundaries of executive power, particularly Mr. Trump.
But it is also the result of the justices’ decision to entertain emergency requests like the one in 2016, warping procedures that had developed over centuries.
Perhaps someone could also point out to the brain trust at the NYT that it is the Left’s penchant for lawfare and the activist judges who make these highly partisan and ideologically skewed decisions that have resulted in the need for a method that expedites reviews and judgments by the highest court.
Of all people, Justice Sotomayor admits as much.
In an appearance this month at the University of Alabama, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reflected on the unceasing flood of emergency applications.
“We’ve done it to ourselves,” she said.
Editor’s Note: Unelected federal judges are hijacking President Trump’s agenda and insulting the will of the people.
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