This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a flurry of internal Supreme Court memos related to its unsigned, unexplained February 2016 order that blocked the Clean Power Plan, an Environmental Protection Agency rule that required states to implement plans to reduce carbon emissions within their borders, from taking effect. At the time, this was (to use a legal term of art) pretty weird: When the Court issued its ruling, a Republican-led challenge to the rule was still pending before a federal appeals court in D.C. By leapfrogging that court, the justices extended special treatment to this country’s fossil fuels industry, effectively concluding that the viability of its business model was simply too important to leave to the usual legal process.
The Court’s order gave rise to what is now known as the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”—a form of expedited review that the conservative justices have since wielded at their convenience to stymie Democratic presidents on the one hand, and, on the other, to give President Donald Trump just about anything he wants. The memos obtained by the Times make clear that one of the principal reasons the Court acted as it did is that Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong Republican, really did not like what would have been President Barack Obama’s signature climate initiative, and decided to use the powers of his office to spike it.
There is, as they say, a lot going on in these memos. But it is worth remembering that of the many, many justices who would bristle at the notion that the Court would ever allow partisan politics to taint its deliberative process in this manner, none do so quite as officiously as Roberts. In 2018, after Trump disparaged a particular court ruling as the work of an “Obama judge,” Roberts issued a rare public rebuke: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
