The Supreme Court Owes the Country Explanations for Its Big Decisions [View all]

FWIW Useless NYT treatise on the Trump Supreme Whorehouse

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/supreme-court-emergency-rulings.html

https://archive.ph/zccuk

The Supreme Court Owes the Country Explanations for Its Big Decisions
July 28, 2025
By The Editorial Board

Federal judges are not elected by the public. Nor are they supposed to make decisions based on their ideological preferences. Our political system instead vests them with the power to decide whether the president, Congress and other lawmakers are enacting policies that are consistent with previous laws, court rulings and, above all, the Constitution.

For these reasons, the credibility of judges depends on their ability to offer public explanation for the legal basis of their decisions. When judges show their work, the public can assess it by the standards the judiciary sets for itself — reasoning grounded in law and judicial precedent. Without that, judges risk their legitimacy. Clear explanation is especially important for the Supreme Court, which sets national rules that lower courts must follow. When the court fails to make these rules clear, confusion can set in.

The current Supreme Court is creating precisely this problem by issuing many important rulings as brief, unsigned orders on its so-called emergency docket. On this docket (also known as the shadow docket), the votes among the nine justices are not public, and the majorities typically offer little explanation for their decisions. Yet the justices have used the emergency docket this year to hand down a series of rulings allowing President Trump to expand executive power and alter the structure of government.

In following this path, the justices are ducking one of their crucial responsibilities: making persuasive arguments with which we can all engage. This overuse of the emergency docket is a self-inflicted wound. It diminishes public confidence in government when that confidence is already low.

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