This is one of the scariest distortions I’ve read in the New York Times recently. The article focuses on the conditional apology given by a Reagan appointed federal judge after he was scolded by two bullies on the 6-3 Leonard Leo majority Supreme Court for not following “binding precedent” — an unsigned summary order, with no legal reasoning they released on an emergency basis to serve President Project 2025. Their ruling on massive cuts to the The Department of Education, they scolded, obviously applied to cutting NIH grants to study cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV and similar deadly plagues. This was a bit of unprecedented bullying by these radical right ideologues. The Grey Lady styled it as the federal judge (who ruled correctly) messing up and legitimately being required to apologize.
Let us also note that an emergency application from Special Counsel Jack Smith languished for seven months before the 6-3 far right majority granted candidate Trump unprecedented blanket immunity for any crimes committed by a US president as part of his “core duties” (try to imagine the hypothetical where a president would have to commit a crime to do his job, the six provided none). Their delayed ruling effectively ended the prosecutions of Trump for violating the Espionage Act (by taking classified documents to his home when he was out of office), obstructing justice (having his lawyers lie by claiming he’d returned everything), and trying to overturn the results of an election he was well aware he lost.
In glaring contrast, every one of Trump’s emergency applications, complaining he’s not being allowed to commit random illegal acts, is immediately heard and almost invariably decided by the far right six in the hardened sociopath’s favor. As was his emergency application after he was busted by federal judges for illegally firing tens of thousands of civil servants without cause and violating other laws.
Here is the Gray Lady’s idiotic headline about the Supreme Court extending its power in a hideously fascistic manner (while neutering lower federal courts):
Judge Apologizes to Conservative Justices in Case Over N.I.H. Cuts
Judge Young said on Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.
“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Judge Young, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.
“I can do nothing more than to say as honestly as I can: I certainly did not so intend, and that is foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer,” he added.
Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with White House in nearly every case it has considered.
Wrong headline. Wrong framing. Here’s a better headline, off the top of my head:
Respected federal judge bullied by Trump appointees for not recognizing their unsigned, three page “emergency” shadow docket ruling as binding precedent.
Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with the New York Times sometimes, they only intermittently serve the interests of democracy in their reporting.
For one thing, the federal judge’s apology was conditional — if I offended you, I’m sorry. This is known as an if-pology. The New York Times apparently doesn’t make this distinction. The judge defended his actions while “apologizing”– how was he expected to know an unsigned three page emergency ruling was now binding federal precedent according to two members of the highly partisan Supreme Court majority? How indeed? He had to be told by two of the six doctrinaire jurists who made their way up the far right judicial pipeline by proving their brazenness and fidelity to the dogma of their extremist judicial fraternity.
Read the rest of the article, it doesn’t spell things out with the greatest of clarity, but it eventually manages to make clear how offended the judge who apologized was to be singled out this way for an ass whupping by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch (two prep school bullies whose powerful mothers both assured them they were destined to sit on the Supreme Court). Another triumph of incoherence by Project 2025’s architects, with a snazzy assist from the journal of record.
Supreme Court precedents are binding rulings that all federal courts must follow. They are traditionally based on articulated legal reasoning, analyzing and evaluating the arguments of both sides in light of past Supreme Court decisions directly impacting the issue in question. Supreme Court holdings are based on centuries of case law, legislative history, the text of the Constitution, the merits of both sides of the constitutional argument presented.
These emergency “shadow docket” rulings, sometimes only a paragraph, answer only the narrow burning question placed in front of the court for immediate, emergency decision. The Supreme Court, in the past, has rarely ruled this way, except on the eve of an execution, for example. It is now routine for Trump to run to his appointees for these “shadow docket” rulings which are made without briefing or argument, citing no cases, no precedent, no legal analysis. His record is something like 16-0 in these unsigned majority orders.
To force federal judges to consider these abbreviated, unsigned emergency rulings “binding precedent” is an abomination on the Constitution, the specialty of this particular group of six transactional corporate assholes in robes. Shame on the Grey Lady for helping to obscure how radical and dangerous this latest overreach by these judicial arsonists is.
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