The legendary baseball player and manager Ted Williams once wrote a letter to the Angels outfielder Jay Johnstone on improving his hitting. Among his pieces of advice was that “with two strikes, you simply have to protect the plate.”
Williams’s advice on not striking out came to mind this week when another leak of confidential information rocked the Supreme Court. (The prior leak of the Dobbs decision went unsolved). For Chief Justice John Roberts, the message is clear: it is a time like this when you have to protect the plate.
Roberts, of course, is famous for his own baseball analogies. In his confirmation, he declared that “judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them…Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”
Yet, justices do make rules not only in new precedent, but in the operation of the court system. Those rules are being broken.
In the same week as the new leak, Justice Sonia Sotomayor attacked her colleague Brett Kavanaugh as essentially an out-of-touch prig who had never even met an hourly wage worker. It was an unfair insult and a departure from the Court’s long-standing rules of civility. (Sotomayor later apologized).
Additionally, a forthcoming book by Mollie Hemingway on Justice Samuel Alito contains an embarrassing account of how Justice Elena Kagan allegedly screamed at Justice Stephen Breyer so loudly before the Dobbs opinion that the “wall was shaking.” (The book suggests that Kagan was upset with Breyer agreeing to spur along the dissents to get out the final opinions in light of rising threats against conservative colleagues after the leak).
For an institution that prides itself on its confidentiality and insularity, the Court is looking increasingly porous and partisan in these leaks. Worse yet, people are indeed coming to the Court “to see the umpires.”
The most recent leak was published by the New York Times, which was given internal memos from various Supreme Court justices on the use of what is known as the “shadow docket” to issue rulings without oral arguments.
Notably, the leaks occurred after a controversial speech by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at Yale Law School in which she denounced the use of the shadow docket by her conservative colleagues to release decisions that were sometimes “utterly irrational.”
The memos reveal the concern of the justices that the Environmental Protection Agency was effectively gaming the system, imposing unlawful regulatory burdens on electric utilities despite a countervailing earlier ruling in Michigan v. EPA.
Chief Justice Roberts noted that the EPA was using the ongoing litigation to force utilities to spend billions of dollars to comply with the new regulations: “In other words the absence of stay allowed the agency to effectively implement an important program we held to be contrary to law.”
The controversy over the use of the shadow docket is immaterial to this story. The most immediate concern for Roberts should be that this is strike two: another leak from within the Court that was clearly designed to wound some of its members.
Unlike the Dobbs leak (which appeared to be an effort to influence the final opinion), this is a leak about a decade-old case. It had a purely malicious purpose to embarrass or disrupt the Court.
The question, again, is the identity of the culprit. There is no reason to assume that the same person was involved in both leaks. Rather, the leaks appear to reflect a deteriorating culture at the Court.
After the Dobbs leak, Chief Justice Roberts launched a fruitless investigation through the federal marshals to find the responsible person. The use of the marshals as the lead investigators (rather than the FBI) was criticized at the time. Roberts may have been sensitive to an executive-branch agency rooting around in the highest court of a sister branch.
The result was the worst possible outcome. The culprit succeeded in both leaking the opinion and evading any accountability.
The fact is that the Court’s culture and institutional identity have always been its greatest protection of confidentiality. In a city that floats on a rolling sea of leaks, the Court was an island of integrity and civility. The “umpires” could call balls and strikes without playing the leak game.
That culture is fast becoming nothing but a relic in the wake of yet another major leak. For the future of the Court and the faith of the public, Roberts has to set his reservations aside and bring in the FBI to find the culprit. Most importantly, he has to guarantee total transparency in allowing the public to see the results wherever they may lead. In other words, with two strikes, Roberts needs to protect the plate.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution
This column ran on Fox.com
What’s going on here is not just a leak of internal deliberations that someone does not agree with, it is an effort to undermine and destroy they system as it exists. Socialist and democratic liberals are under the impression that if they can demolish the current system they will replace it with a better one of their own design. Should they succeed in destroying the current system we will descend into a cult of personality similar to that of Joseph Stalin who consolidated all power to himself.
Maybe CJ Roberts can rein in his good buddies like Norm Eisen, Andrew Weismann, and Bo*assberg before they thoroughly destroy this country and turn it into a one party shlitshow.
https://rumble.com/v78s0r0-jeff-clark-promises-radical-accountability-oversight-project-to-lead-the-ch.html
The left has their own “living, breathing” constitution which we can’t see. But they get quite upset when the umps cross their imaginary red line. And when the next Senate puts another dozen justices on the court, the real constitution will be forgotten by the angry people who can spend but not govern.
Until recently, when the justices and their minions decided it was time to open themselves to celebrity culture, with leaks and snark and nasty allegations, the Supreme Court was the only branch of the federal government that could lay claim to some intellectual ambitions, realized or not.
Now the Court is just like any other trash entity. There is no time to take seriously any of Justice Katanji Brown’s criticisms of the shadow docket. These criticisms are worthy of attention but all that is of interest is who the New York Times leaker was. Fingers point to Justice Katanji Brown but the more suspicious wonder if she was set up by a political enemy to be the subject of leak scrutiny.
Direct public personal attacks from one justice to another are a new low. Accounts of one justice screaming at another offer little that is admirable, both in the acts of screaming, if they happened, and in the publication of them.
TURLEY = great writer 🎈⚡️
This is hilarious: “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at Yale Law School in which she denounced the use of the shadow docket by her conservative colleagues to release decisions that were sometimes ‘utterly irrational.’” Said the judge who couldn’t define a woman because not biologist?
She wouldn’t define “woman’ because it was an attempt at baiting and she was smart enough not to take it.
Go ahead – define what a woman is. Make sure that everyone who is a woman is covered and everyone who is not is excluded.
If it was that easy the Republicans would have done that decades ago, but it’s not, but you can be the first to try.
YOU R SUCH A JERK
U R SO DEEPLY IMPRESSED WITH U
MISS PIGGY
You’re trying to make something simple to seem hard. It isn’t. A woman is an adult who was born with the sexual characteristics of a female. It is that simple.
“. . . everyone who is a woman is covered and everyone who is not is excluded.”
Fascinating. You’ve used one of the rules of definitions (jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive) to argue that the concept “woman” cannot be defined.
Do you often commit such obvious contradictions?
It’s very easy. An adult human female.
Turley Writes:
The controversy over the use of the shadow docket is immaterial to this story.
*************
Just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016, the Supreme Court issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling that sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions.
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.
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.
Edited From The New York Times.
………………………………..
Turley knows the New York Times has a paywall. He also knows that few of his readers would even look at the New York Times.
So Turley brazenly tells us: “The controversy over use of the shadow docket is immaterial to this story”
NO, IT IS NOT!!!!
As this story tells us, John Roberts essentially invented the shadow docket only 10 years ago. No such mechanism existed before that. There was no judicial tradition of shadow dockets.
John Roberts feared Obama’s EPA could possibly ruin West Virginia’s coal industry. So Roberts felt that SCOTUS should intervene before the lower courts ruled in favor of the EPA.
With that Roberts created a process by which the high court could short-circuit cases it didn’t like. The cases would be aborted before arguments were heard. No opinions would be drafted based on testimony.
Instead the high court would issue an unsigned memo. One that hands victory by default to a favored side. SCOTUS could simply choose the winner with no explanation!
Yet Johnathan Turley, a constitutional law professor, wants us to think that leaks to the New York Times are far more serious than the shadow docket. Like we shouldn’t care if this court is just doing its own thing.
So you have a problem with the Supreme Court, acting against an obviously unconstitutional regulation implemented by a president and an out of controlgovernment agent?
It is so lovely to see you under the control of jonathan. he makes you so miserable in so many ways.
listen, babe, we can’t stand you, but you never make us feel awful, you know? in fact, we get a kick out of knowing how defeated and unhappy u r 24/7. it is pure joy
Chief Justice Roberts has to have a sit down with the members of the Court, as well as the law clerks, and make it clear that the entire Court is acting in an intolerable way in terms of both substance and attitude. I wonder just how diligently Chief Justice Roberts was in ferreting out who leaked the Dobbs decision, and I am far from confident that he will take strong steps to put an end to this childish behavior by members of the Court and their staffs. This Court runs the risk of becoming a reality TV show.
Roberts probably knows who leaked the Dobbs decision, and probably knew it early on. But he is more interested in the reputation of his court than in how well it is functioning. Revealing the identity of the leaker would probably be embarrassing in some way and he won’t have that. He will not take any strong steps, or any steps at all. He is the primary problem the court is experiencing. He might well be the weakest Chief Justice ever, and at a time when a strong Chief Justice is most needed given the weaponization of the justice system under Obama/Biden and blatant interference by leftist lower court judges appointed by them. Roberts himself is the main problem and there is no immediate fix for that since he might have another 20 years on the court.
Leftist are willing to destroy anything to get their way.
“Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth’.”
– Genesis 1:28 (NKJV)
__________________________
Somebody tell Spanberger that God endorsed slavery and, presumably, the Confederacy:
“…have dominion over…every living thing that moves on the earth.”
I never noticed His endorsement before.
Are failure to report a known felony and suppression of evidence crimes?
Why would anyone willfully and deliberately suppress evidence that was ultimately very important to a nation?
“He raped me, and he choked me. And while he was choking me, I lost consciousness. And I thought I died. I did not consent to any sexual activity,” Lonna Drewes told reporters at a press conference at the office of her lawyers in Beverly Hills.
Why was Swalwell protected for the eight years by Lonna Drewes et al. subsequent to her rape?
Explosive Report: As Dobbs Majority Faced Death Threats, Liberal Justices Slow-Walked Release
‘Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome,’ Hemingway writes in Alito.
https://thefederalist.com/2026/04/18/explosive-report-as-dobbs-majority-faced-death-threats-liberal-justices-slow-walked-release/
So the liberal justices were trying to increase the odds that the turmoil would result in the death of one of their colleagues. Lovely.
Ah, the reason for the leak.
OT. Surveillance pricing is when prices change per customer by having background info on shoppers. Maryland is passing law to make it a crime. I’ve noticed it. A price of 22 dollars suddenly changes to 34 dollars. Nothing but crooks…
Malicious cynicism
These more marxist-leaning justices are just implementing the standard “we’re losing! scorched earth” policy.
Same strategy iran is engaging in. They want to burn it all down cause they can’t win. They won’t be following ‘long-standing rules of civility’ or any civility when losing like currently. Thankfully these two are in the useful idiots category so harmless at the moment.