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There is something deeply incongruous about the formal letterhead Chief Justice John Roberts used to lobby his colleagues against President Barack Obama’s signature climate policy. On Saturday, the New York Times published this document as part of a report on a stunning set of leaked internal memos from 2016 that effectively launched the Supreme Court’s modern shadow docket. At first glance, the documents look like a legitimate judicial product. A “Memorandum to the Conference” from the “Chambers of the Chief Justice” certainly appears as if it might have been penned by a judge doing law. But these trappings of formality cannot elevate Roberts’ partisan efforts into a principled judging. The substance of his arguments, as Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck has carefully explained, is riddled with errors and oversights, and it appears to be cheap ornamentation gilding a petty vendetta against the Obama administration. And yet, in a time before the current conservative supermajority took hold, the chief’s views carried the day, leading SCOTUS to issue an unprecedented 5–4 stay against the climate plan. And the shadow docket, as we know it today, was born.

While the court’s conservatives have railed at the term “shadow docket” for years, insisting that the words imply secrecy and bad motives to a benign emergency procedure that operates according to neutral legal principles, the new reporting reveals exactly why the Republican-appointed justices don’t want to shine public or academic light on this practice: If this leak is any indication, the public would be aghast to see the brazenly political, spin-soaked flimflam that goes into deciding these critical cases.

The Times’ latest exposé, by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, documents the previously opaque internal court debate that led up to the Supreme Court’s unprecedented obstruction of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2016. That they did so in a cryptic one-paragraph ruling was, in Kagan’s words at the time, “unprecedented.” This event, though, became the precedent for all that followed. The EPA rule at issue would have required states to gradually shift energy generation toward green technology in a bid to fight climate change. Industry groups and red states swiftly challenged its legality, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District........

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