(Holy Shit the Brunson case was put on the Shadow Docket at the SC!)
Every Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sits Out Decision in Rare Move
Updated May 28, 2024at 6:42
Every liberal U.S. Supreme Court justice sat out of a decision this week in a rare move for the nation's highest court.
On Tuesday, Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson sat out of a decision in Brunson v. Sotomayor,== et al. Each of the three liberal justices was named as a defendant in the case. They did not provide a specific reason for sitting out and are not required to do so.
The case was brought by Raland Brunson, who attempted to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election and named the three justices as defendants for denying a writ of certiorari in a previous appeals case.
Newsweek reached out to the Supreme Court via email for comment.
The justices' absence comes days after Sotomayor delivered a speechat Harvard in which she revealed that some past cases had made her emotional.
"There are days that I've come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried," she said. "There have been those days. And there are likely to be more."
The line about future cases was dubbed "ominous" by legal analyst Glenn Kirschner, who said on X, formerly Twitter: "The Supreme Court has revoked women's constitutional privacy rights, sanctioned business discrimination as long as it's cloaked in religious piety, killed equal educational opportunities for minorities& there's more to come? How much more are we willing to take?"
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down decisions on dozens of cases by the end of June. One case will be focused on the January 6 riots and how the U.S. Department of Justice can prosecute these cases.
While this is a rare move to have each of the three liberal Supreme Court justices sit out of a decision, it is far from the first time some on the bench have removed themselves.
Last week, Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson sat out of a decision relating to a Canadian-born former Guantanamo Bay detainee who sought to have his war crimes convictions vacated. The writ of certiorari was denied, the court said in a document on Monday.
Both Kavanaugh and Jackson had previously heard arguments relating to the case when they were appeals court judges.
Similarly, in January, every conservative justice sat out of a case in which they werenamed as defendants.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett all sat out deciding whether to hear MacTruong v. Abbott, a case arguing that the Texas Heartbeat Act (THA) is constitutional and that the state law violates federal law.The six justices were named as defendants in the case.
They did not give a detailed justification as to why they chose not to weigh in.
(https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-liberal-justices-sit-out-decision-1905521
What is the shadow docket?
The shadow, or emergency, docket, is the way many cases today, sometimes hugely consequential cases, aredecided, without full briefing or oral argument, and without any written opinion.
These cases are brought to the court by a state, or a company, or a person who has lost in the lower courts, often at an early stage, and that loser is now asking the Supreme Court to block the lower court order while the case proceeds through the lower court appeals process, which typically takes many months. Most recently, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order blocking lower court decrees that would have made it far more difficult to obtain mifepristone, the pill used in the majority of abortions in the United States today. As is typical in these shadow docket cases, the court issued no written opinion in the case, though Justice Alito, one of the two dissenters, issued an angry explanation for his disagreement with the majority.
Up until relatively recently, these shadow docket actions were quite rare. The statistics tell the story, statistics compiled by Vladeck. During the 16 years of the Bush and Obama administrations, the federal government, the most frequent litigant in the Supreme Court, only asked the justices for emergency relief eight times–or on average once every two years. The two administrations together got what they wanted in only four of the eight cases, and in all but one of them the court spoke with one voice, and no dissent…
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/22/1177228505/supreme-court-shadow-docket