The Supreme Court should be unbiased and respected. But that has been thrown out the window.
Now the Supreme Court fell under an attack with huge ramifications for America.
SOMEONE IS WAGING WAR ON THE SUPREME COURT FROM WITHIN — AND EXPERTS SAY IT’S NO ACCIDENT
The leaking of decade-old internal Supreme Court memos to The New York Times last weekend was not about transparency, accountability, or the public interest. It was a hit job. And experts on both sides of the political spectrum are increasingly saying so out loud.
The memos, which showed Chief Justice John Roberts pressing his colleagues in 2016 to quickly block President Obama’s Clean Power Plan via the emergency docket, were immediately seized upon by the left as evidence that the so-called “shadow docket” has long been weaponized by conservatives. The New York Times obligingly described Roberts as acting like a “bulldozer.” Advocacy groups released statements denouncing the court’s emergency procedures. Democratic allies on Capitol Hill dusted off their talking points about an institution in crisis.
But legal experts who actually know how the court works say the memos themselves are not really the story. The story is the leak.
A DELIBERATE ATTACK ON THE COURT’S CREDIBILITY
“The liberals are salivating over this,” South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman told Fox News Digital. “They’re very happy because it reinforces their narrative.”
But Blackman made clear that the more important issue runs deeper than partisan advantage. “The bigger issue is people are leaking stuff to try to hurt the court,” he said. “That’s the bigger story. This was done to try to make the court look bad. Roberts, I think, doesn’t come out looking very good in this one. … I think it’s designed to hurt the chief in particular.”
That assessment is not idle speculation. A pattern is forming. A similar, smaller-scale leak to the same New York Times reporters occurred in 2024. Before that came the Dobbs leak to Politico in 2022 — a stunning breach of confidentiality widely believed to have been aimed at influencing the final opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Now decade-old internal communications are surfacing, with no conceivable legal significance, at a moment when the court’s emergency docket has been the subject of sustained liberal attack.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley drew the distinction sharply: while the Dobbs leak appeared to be “an effort to influence the final opinion,” this latest breach involves an old case and therefore “had a purely malicious purpose to embarrass or disrupt the court.” Turley’s conclusion: “The leaks appear to reflect a deteriorating culture at the court.”
WHO IS DOING THIS — AND WHO BENEFITS?
The theory circulating in legal circles is that a liberal justice, a retired liberal justice, or one of their former clerks passed the 16 pages of internal memos to the Times. Blackman warned the situation may not be contained: “This person probably kept a lot of things and decided to leak this, and there might be even more coming. I think this is absolutely partisan, and it’s done in a way to hurt and wound the court and to reaffirm this notion that the shadow docket is an evil, nefarious regime.”
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who clerked for Chief Justice Roberts alongside his wife Erin, called the timing and framing unmistakable. “You can tell from the news article that builds it that way,” Hawley said of the Times piece. “They criticize the court for how they’re managing their docket. They say this is some big conspiracy. The only conspiracy is the multi-year effort funded by somebody to undermine the institution of the court from within, from without. … We need to find out who’s doing this.”
Left-leaning justices have not been shy about using public platforms to advance their frustration with the court’s conservative majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently delivered a speech at Yale Law School tearing into the majority’s emergency docket decisions as rushed “scratch-paper musings” advancing “harmful” policies. Rep. Jamie Raskin, introducing legislation targeting emergency docket transparency, declared that “the Roberts Court’s reliance on the Shadow Docket to covertly fast-track one-paragraph decisions on major cases drives tremendous mistrust.”
All of this amounts to a coordinated campaign — waged through leaked documents, public speeches, and legislative proposals — to delegitimize a court that has, in Trump’s second term, consistently ruled in favor of the administration’s immigration policies, federal employee actions, and contract decisions. The emergency docket is the vehicle conservatives are using most effectively, so it has become the target.
Blackman drew the bluntest possible bottom line on accountability: “If a liberal leaks they’ll get a medal. They’ll become a hero. They’ll suffer zero professional consequences. In fact, they’ll probably be better off.”
That asymmetry — where leaking to damage a conservative-majority court is rewarded rather than punished — is precisely what makes the threat ongoing. Until someone inside the institution faces real consequences, the leaks will not stop.
