I didn’t know there was a season for hurricanes rulings.

What the article should have said is todd, by expanding the shadow docket, the Supreme Court got to make itself more of a political figure. The Republican members wanted to gain power in the short run, and they did.

But this actually comes at the expense of quality, and clearly they don’t care about quality, because normally cases that go to the Supreme Court come up through the appeals courts. So the factual matters are settled. In other words, everyone is fully briefed, and all of the facts are on the table. But when we have the Supreme Court stepping in early, they have created a situation where they can ignore the facts on hand because those facts haven’t been entered into record yet, and they can decide the case in favor of the Republican litigant. And even if the facts would have turned out to be different, now it kind of doesn’t matter because everything is already over.

In the medium run, the United States democracy is falling apart, but if it somehow holds together, then a lot of these emergency decisions are going to be reversed by future Supreme Courts for the reasons mentioned above. You just can’t reliably create good law if you don’t have all of the facts on hand.