Times Smears SCOTUS With Leaks
The Leftmedia is engaging in an unprecedented smear campaign against the U.S. Supreme Court, primarily to discredit the conservative justices.
Democrats and their Leftmedia propagandists do not like the fact that the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court leans toward a conservative constitutionalist court rather than an activist, progressively minded one.
As a result, in subsequent weeks, another Leftmedia outlet — first, it was The Washington Post; this time, The New York Times — has run a hit piece against the institution, suggesting that the Court is effectively committed to upholding the agenda of President Donald Trump.
In an article titled “The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court,” the Times alleges that it secretly obtained SCOTUS memos confirming the existence of a “shadow docket” within the judiciary. The Times claims that this “shadow docket” essentially exists to rubber-stamp and fast-track rulings in favor of conservatives with little to no dialogue or debate between the justices.
The Times cites a 5-4 ruling in 2016 that blocked then-President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The article notes, “[The justices] acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.”
The article asserts that this decision began a pattern wherein the Roberts Court would fast-track cases, often superseding lower courts to issue a number of major decisions. The Times observes that this practice has benefited President Trump with more than 20 rulings on his immigration enforcement policies. “Why did a majority of the justices bypass time-tested procedures and opt for a new way of doing business?” The Times cryptically asks. In answer, it quotes Georgetown University professor Stephen Vladeck, who opines, “We’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period).”
Well, now the Times claims it has obtained leaked memos from the Court, from anonymous sources, of course, which shed light on the reason. And in the case of Obama, Chief Justice John Roberts’s supposed rationale was to prevent Obama’s anti-coal plan from moving forward because it would be “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” which would prove devastating to the nation’s energy industry.
Roberts may have considered that, but there were likely additional factors that fell under constitutional fidelity concerns. But of course, the Times is not interested in reporting on those.
The article pivots to suggest that, when it comes to Trump, the Court has done the opposite, empowering his agenda rather than checking his power. That is not an accurate view of the Court’s rulings on either president. For example, it was the Roberts Court that shamefully upheld ObamaCare, with the chief justice effectively rewriting the law to treat its health insurance mandate and penalty as a tax to make it legal. Furthermore, in a recent massive ruling that significantly undermines Trump’s geopolitical and economic agenda, the Court ruled against his tariff powers.
Those two cases effectively blow up the Times’s entire narrative. And they aren’t the only examples.
The Times is trying to create the false impression that the Roberts Court is acting in an unprecedented and underhanded manner to promote a conservative agenda, irrespective of constitutional considerations. (Side note: The conservative agenda largely is constitutional considerations.)
As noted above, the Leftmedia’s objective is to sow distrust and discord against the highest court in the land. To smear the Court as acting as effectively as a conservative activist court, when the opposite is the case.
As Mollie Hemingway sarcastically observed, “Another major Supreme Court leak to a left-media outlet to support a left-wing narrative. Interesting.”