(Originally published by The Washington Post on April 24, 2026.)

Controversy over the Supreme Court’s so-called shadow docket has dialed up to an 11. Last week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told an appreciative audience at Yale that there’s a “serious concern” that the court’s “modern stay practices are having an enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect” on the “judiciary’s usual decision-making process.” The New York Times then published confidential internal memos concerning the justices’ 5-4 decision to halt President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2016. That moment, some commentators have claimed, was the “birth” of the court’s active engagement with presidential initiatives — a “brazenly political” practice used to play “political favorites.”

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