Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday that the Supreme Court has itself to blame for the flood of emergency appeals it now receives.
“We did it by ourselves,” Sotomayor said during an appearance at the University of Alabama Law School. “The newspapers are full of how many emergency motions we are receiving. It is unprecedented in the history of the court.”
The Trump administration has filed about 30 emergency applications in the Supreme Court in the last 15 months, winning more than 80 percent of them. Many of those decisions split the court 6–3 along ideological lines.
Sotomayor attributed the administration’s victory to the newfound belief among many of her colleagues that whenever federal government policies are blocked, it causes the kind of irreparable harm that justifies high court intervention.
“We have disagreements right now,” the Barack Obama appointee said. “There are members of my Court … who believe that when Congress passes a law, ignoring that law causes irreparable harm to Congress and the people … This has changed the paradigm of the Court.”
Sotomayor raised a similar topic in a dissent last year, when the court greenlighted a Trump administration policy that expanded deportations of immigrants in countries where they had no ties.
“Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial,” he wrote.
Critics have blamed the High Court for resolving too many important disputes on its emergency or “shadow” docket, often with little or no explanation from the majority for its decisions.
Trump administration officials say the emergency appeals to the Supreme Court were prompted by the unprecedented number of injunctions against administration policies.
