Good morning. Iran said it would retaliate after the U.S. seized an Iranian cargo ship near the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump said American negotiators would arrive in Pakistan today for a second round of peace talks. We’ll get to that, and more, below — including a look at the movie “Reefer Madness” because it’s 4/20. But first, let’s go behind the scenes at the Supreme Court.
In chambersHere’s how the Supreme Court generally makes decisions: For more than 200 years, it has worked at a slow and deliberate pace, weighing written briefs and oral arguments. The justices listen, read, discuss, vote and write detailed opinions and dissents that explain their thinking. They pass judgment only after lower courts have ruled. In February 2016, though, the justices issued a short, cryptic ruling on an environmental policy from the Obama administration, days after receiving abbreviated briefs and without hearing oral arguments. In a terse paragraph heavy on legal boilerplate, and lacking any reasoning, the court simply blocked the president’s energy plan. Why did that happen? Ordinarily, we’d have had to wait generations to hear the answer — until well after the deaths of the justices involved, when their private papers came into the public domain. But Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, whose work has been giving us a new view of the Supreme Court, obtained memos the justices wrote to one another in the days before the release of their 2016 decision that help illuminate the reason. The memos don’t show much evidence of the careful debate that usually attends the justices’ work. Instead, as Jodi and Adam report, they show Chief Justice John Roberts forcefully arguing that the subject was too important to wait for their normal procedures. Since 2016, the Supreme Court has relied more and more on that fast track, which legal experts call the “shadow docket,” to make decisions. The rulings are nominally temporary; the justices often come back with a full decision a year or two later. But the effects can be profound. The current justices have granted President Trump more than 20 victories this way, burnishing his power over immigration, federal funding and executive agencies. The Times is publishing the memos to show how the court shifted to doing business this way. A flurry of memos
The 2016 case put two visions of government in conflict. Here’s Jodi and Adam: The president was under enormous pressure to address the global climate crisis. He had campaigned on that promise, then for eight years as the planet heated, he failed to get major environmental legislation through Congress. With his term about to end, this was his last chance to act. The chief justice was eager to assert his institution’s authority and to rein in Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency. The memos show that Roberts used the shadow docket to do both. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan had proposed to shift the nation’s energy consumption from coal to renewables. When more than two dozen states, along with business groups, sued to stop it, an appeals court allowed the plan to continue until it issued a decision. The challengers then went directly to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to hit pause while the litigation continued. It was what the court calls an “emergency request.” Roberts got that request in late January, just as the justices were leaving Washington for their annual midwinter break: Clarence Thomas was in Florida; Stephen Breyer went to Paris to lecture; Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a talk in Italy; Antonin Scalia traveled to Asia. Across a five-day blizzard of memos, the justices hashed it out: Writing on formal letterhead, but addressing one another by their first names and signing off with their initials, they sound notes of irritation, air grievances and plead for more time. In addition to the usual legal materials, they cite a blog post and, twice, a television interview. They sometimes engage with one another’s arguments. But they often simply talk past each other. Roberts insisted that they halt the president’s Clean Power Plan before the court could weigh the arguments, because it “will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector.” At the end, the liberal and conservative justices were tied, so the decision came down to Anthony Kennedy. He made it in a three-sentence note. He believed that the court would ultimately stop the Clean Power Plan anyway, and saw no reason to put off the decision. The new normalSince the 2016 decision about the Clean Power Plan, applications to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket have mushroomed. Partly that’s because of a gridlocked Congress. Partly it’s because presidents, especially Trump, push the boundaries of executive power. But as Jodi and Adam write, it is also because judges departed from a legal tradition that developed over centuries — now, to Trump’s benefit. Many of the emergency challenges the justices receive from the left today concern “substantial and irreversible changes,” just like the Clean Power Plan was said to do. But this time, the justices let them stand. “We’ve done it to ourselves,” Sotomayor said at a speech in Alabama this month. This investigation is what we call in the newsroom a real scoop. It’s incredibly rare to see how the justices talk to each other outside of public view. Read their exchanges here. And you can listen to Jodi and Adam discuss the investigation on today’s episode of The Daily.
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Title X was created to help give women access to affordable contraceptives and health care. Trump is upending this, Jill Filipovic writes. Here is a column by David French on Trump’s feud with the pope. Human made. Human played. 75% off. Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.
Gen Z resistance: A youthful revolution brought down Nepal’s government and gave hope to young people worldwide. Will it lead to real change? Americans abroad: Some went to save money. Now, they can’t afford to come back. Metropolitan Diary: Divided by a common language. A songwriter: Don Schlitz won a Grammy for the Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler,” and also wrote for Randy Travis, the Judds and Mary Chapin Carpenter. He died at 73.
31,556,952— That is how many seconds there are in a year, according to the calculations of Sean McGowan, a writer on our Games team, who extrapolated it from a crossword clue last week: “1/86,400 of a day: Abbr.” I’ll let him explain.
N.B.A.: The defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder opened the first round of the Western Conference playoffs with a 119-84 blowout win over the Phoenix Suns. In the Eastern Conference, Jayson Tatum led the Boston Celtics to a 123-91 win over the Philadelphia 76ers. M.L.B.: The New York Mets lost their 11th straight game. This skid is the Mets’ worst since 2004.
Jimmy Bradley was the chef and owner of a terrific Manhattan restaurant called the Red Cat. It had a nearly 20-year run in Chelsea before closing in 2018. Some days I get sentimental about it and make this salad I used to eat at the bar: a Gruyère fondue, basically, topped with bacon, potato wedges and a bitter salad of greens — cold against warm, and salty against faintly sweet and acidic. Give it a shot this week. You won’t be sorry.
Let’s memorize a poem together this week. For one thing, it’s fun. For another, it’s a challenge that yields an intense reward: You’ve memorized a poem. That’s not nothing. We did this last year and more readers than we can count took part. Now we’re on to a new challenge: W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One.” A.O. Scott, the critic who’ll hold our hands through the next five days, calls it “a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.” Watch the actor Matthew McConaughey read the poem and then join us in learning it by heart. |
