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Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It's an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word. She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.
Hello, and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. I'm your host today, Leah Littman. Kate and Melissa are on the road. Don't worry, they haven't been in any catastrophic bike accidents, so we will all be back together for the next episode. But I couldn't do this one all by myself, so I am delighted to be joined by two guest hosts who I learn a ton from about the Supreme Court and the courts more generally. I'm Leah Littman, and I'm your host today, Leah Littman.
One of the guest hosts today is Chris Geidner. You've heard us talk a lot about his indispensable independent publication, Lawdork, which you should subscribe to immediately if you haven't already. Welcome to the show, Chris. Hello. So good to be here in spite of the moment we're in. Yes.
And the second guest host is returning guest Amanda Hollis-Bruski, who is the expert on the conservative legal movement and the author or co-author of the essential books Ideas with Consequences on the Federalist Society and Separate but Faithful on the Christian Legal Movement and Takeover of the Courts. Amanda is a professor of politics and chair of the politics department at Pomona College. Welcome back to the show, Amanda. Thanks, Leah. So excited to analyze the fresh hell we've been delivered by SCOTUS today.
All day, every day. So as a roadmap for our listeners, we're going to start with the court's disposition of the EMTALA case on emergency medical care for pregnant patients. Then we will cover the court's most recent attacks on the administrative state. And finally, we will briefly touch on the court's decision in validating the settlement in the bankruptcy case related to Purdue Pharma and opioids. So,
First up, we have the EMTALA decision, the actual decision. This is the case about whether women who are experiencing life and health-threatening pregnancy complications can receive emergency treatment at hospitals in states that ban abortions, including emergency medical treatment that is necessary to save the pregnant patient's life or health. So for this segment, we are delighted to be joined by Fatima Goss Graves, the CEO of the National Women's Law Center. Thank you for joining, Fatima. Thank you.
So glad to be with you. Okay, so just to lay out what happened. The disposition of this case is what the court inadvertently posted on its website yesterday. Just to recap that disposition, six justices agree to dissolve the stay the court had issued in this case. That stay paused a lower court injunction that required Idaho to permit emergency abortion care where EMTALA requires it.
So that means the lower court injunction is back in effect. And in Idaho, women can receive the emergency stabilizing care that EMTALA says they can receive. But also, five justices agreed to dismiss this case as improvidently granted, meaning the court is not deciding whether that lower court injunction is correct or whether EMTALA requires emergency abortion care to be available, even where states try to ban it.
This is important because they could come back later and say EMTALA doesn't authorize emergency care. And two, there are orders in effect in other places, COF, the Fifth Circuit, that say EMTALA does not authorize emergency care in states that ban it, like Texas. So the court's disposition in this case allows other states like Texas to ban stabilizing health saving care for pregnant patients. OK, so that's the basic description.
I'll tell you my quick off-the-cuff reaction, but then I am interested in yours. So to me, this just stinks of a compromise that is part of an effort to allow the court to dodge the issue and not come out and say, yes, states can force hospitals to deny emergency care to pregnant patients at a time when it would be inconvenient politically for the court to say that. Am I too cynical or Fatima? Like, how are you reading this?
Well, it's a really radical idea that pregnant people can't get emergency medical stabilizing care, right? That's a sort of mind-blowing thing that I think most people didn't have on their bingo card as a possibility. So the idea that it leaves the question unanswered
That's that in and of itself is a really radical idea. But at the same time, I have to say, you know, we have clients who have had to flee states seeking care at a time where their health is in jeopardy.
And, you know, for the people in Idaho, the fact that they have had these last six months of uncertainty, the stories of people being helicoptered out of the state, I can't help but wanting to center them as well in this conversation. Yes. So I think...
Mentioning the stories of the people who are affected by these bans, you know, part of the reason I think I'm reading the decision or not decision, lack thereof in this way is it's impossible for me to ignore the backdrop or background for this, which to me includes all of the ads that the Biden administration and Democrats are running about people's abortion stories and their emergency health situations.
with people telling horrifying stories about the danger to their life and health from these abortion bans. They can't run away from those stories, though, right? They can't run away from the story of the person who passed out in the bathroom or the person who was bleeding in a parking lot.
And they're going to hear those stories again and again. We're going to hear them in the presidential debates, I am sure. But you're going to see them on ads. You're going to see people talking about them in community. And so if people thought they could sort of get away with the idea that this is a problem that very few people will be affected by or that there's no real harm here, it's too late for that.
We've seen the harm. And the question is, what are we going to do about it? Well, and as you pointed out, the fact of the matter is, is that the stories are still going to come out of Texas. Like the Fifth Circuit ruling is because they didn't resolve this on the merits, because they dodged it in a way that.
It's more a failure of the court to be able to get five votes to just uphold the supremacy clause than it is some grand compromise by Roberts. I think this was more a failing than a compromise because you are still left with...
the Fifth Circuit. Yeah. And, you know, it speaks to the dysfunction because we're, you know, we're sort of in this situation in the first place because they didn't, they reached down to take the case. So it was also just a weird rule, a weird decision where they were talking about how, how are we to know all of these things hadn't yet been determined. No one told you to take it from the Ninth Circuit before the Ninth Circuit had finished this job. Yeah.
This was one of the worst possible dystopian scenarios if Roe v. Wade were overruled. Right. And that's the thing that people would dismiss it. No, that's not going to happen. Calm your uterus. You're being hysterical. And so I do think that if this is where the court's going, if they're really going to say that EMTALA does not apply in states with criminal abortion bans, then
They're not going to say that before an election. And so as the political scientist here, I am going to read into this more cynical view of this decision, because to have the court definitively say we are going to actually make into law your worst dystopian nightmares and fears about a post-Roe world is
and give them the blessing, then that would, we'd have Rovember, right? And I do think that there's an attempt to avoid that, at least for now.
So I'm going to ask you all in a second, like how likely it is from these opinions, you know, you can pick up where the court is headed on this EMTALA issue. But before I ask that question, I want to support Amanda's political scientist take with the law professor take, because I think there's actually considerable evidence in these opinions that the court is dodging this knowing, right?
we are on the eve of a presidential election. You have Justice Barrett's separate writing with the chief and Justice Kavanaugh bends over backwards to justify dismissing this case, insisting the issues have been narrowed since Idaho's lawyers say the state law permits abortions in some life-saving circumstances. But as Justice Jackson's dissent points out, there's still a conflict
Idaho still bans abortions in cases where the federal government says EMTALA requires them. The federal government has never denied that there are conscious protections. And the Idaho Supreme Court has confirmed this interpretation of state law, which, as Fatima underscored, is playing out on the ground in ways that underscore a conflict.
Justice Jackson's dissent basically accuses the court of doing this, saying the court is using a procedural mechanism, quote, to avoid issues that it does not want to decide. And she says the court has made this bed. So now it must lie in it.
And, you know, Justice Alito, of course, he has to take it to the next level. He accuses Amy Barrett of being too emotional to resolve the EMTALA issue. He literally says, quote, apparently the court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents. So everybody knows what's going on here. But I guess now I want to put the dystopian question to all of you, like how worried are
Should we be or argue that when this issue inevitably gets to the court next, they're going to say that states can prohibit hospitals from providing emergency care to pregnant patients? Listen, I'm deeply worried. I mean, some might say I'm even emotional. I think that's right. I mean, it makes me emotional as an emergency room person. I would like care.
I think that's what's so shocking about it too is that
for 40 years when people have emergencies, they know that you go to the emergency room, right? That is something that is deeply understood and that hospitals can't just turn you away because they disagree with what you did before you got there. So I don't know where the end of that argument would be. And so that is also dystopian in my mind. But
I have to say that what they have done is just invited more and more extreme bans, but also more and more extreme legal theories. In some of this, they should just shut down. They should just say, this makes no sense. Stop talking to me about the spending clause here because it does not make sense. Congress has the authority to do this. Stop talking about...
That is what is also worrisome. I don't know the bounds in this moment. I don't know what is law. We don't know what is law. That is the problem. Maybe not EMTALA, right? It's maybe not EMTALA. It's maybe not the supremacy clause. It's maybe not the spending clause. Like, we really have no idea. And I think the...
The big concern that I have is not even are they holding this for the election, which I think is a bit of it. But like, I just I don't believe if they had a majority, they would hold it. Like, I believe that that what we saw with Dobbs is that they know that.
And some of them have lived through the fact that the court can change on a dime. I didn't want to say it yesterday when the opinion document leaked, but I was like, there's a reality that like...
If a justice dies before a decision is released, it changes and it could change the outcome of this case. And especially when we had the 5-4 rolling on the dig. And so I do think that we shouldn't
We shouldn't ascribe to evil what also can be an incompetence to craft a majority. I agree that if they had a majority, they would have gone forward. That's the lesson I learned from Dobbs. There are all these people predicting that, no, no, it would be politically harmful to overturn Roe. They won't actually do it.
When they have the power to do it, they overturn Roe. So I think that ship has sailed on that. But-
I also think if you just look at the three justices who sort of came together to say, well, not right now, but I don't know, maybe sometime in the future, we need more information. They gave a bit of a roadmap of the type of information they need, the type of plaintiffs that would do well for them to basically say that it is the state that
who has irreparable harm, rather than the people who should be at the center of this, which is, you know, women who are pregnant, anyone who can be pregnant, that should be the very center of the conversation. So it boggles my mind that Idaho could have ever had more harm and injury than the person being flown out of the state by helicopter.
So we should just make explicit the vote breakdown and then maybe we can go through the different opinions. So the six justices who dissolved this day were the chief justice, Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh, and then the three Democratic appointees. And then Justice Jackson peeled off on the dig. She said the court should not have dismissed the
the case. And then you had these separate writings. One was by Justice Barrett, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Kavanaugh. And that's the opinion that, Fatima, you were just alluding to, that basically invites this nonsensical spending clause challenge under which
spending clause legislation could not preempt state criminal laws, even though EMTALA has a preemption clause. And even though there's no doubt Congress would have authority to enact this under the Commerce Clause, and yet this opinion says...
states bring me this challenge. I think it's a difficult question, and that's part of where my nerves come from. And the other part is what you just alluded to, Fatima, the fact that in talking about the balance of equities in this case...
All of the court's concern in that writing is with the possibility that abortions might be performed, not with the possibility that people's lives and health will be put in jeopardy because of these abortion bans. And it's hard not to read that and get very nervous about what this court might do, right, if and when that spending clause issue or some version of it comes back up to them again. Right.
Yeah. And I would I mean, I would just underscore what Fatima said. If you read the Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson opinion, they characterize Alito's dissent in his reading of EMTALA. It turns a both and into an either or. So EMTALA wants to guarantee that the pregnant person and any unborn child is taken into consideration when emergency care is given.
And Alito's dissent turns that into his, his opinion turns it into an either or right where it's the unborn child first and foremost and
and does not take into consideration the pregnant person. And so when we think about who we're centering here, that rhetoric is really frightening. Just on that point, I think an interesting thing that when remembering that Alliance Defending Freedom joined on to represent Idaho in a story that I've been following, their growing representation of actual government entities,
One of the – they advanced this claim, this either-or claim, very strongly. And if you look at the response and look at what happened is that that was actually an amendment into the law. And it was an amendment for the opposite of the reason why it's being used today. It was an amendment –
because hospitals were still refusing to help pregnant women who showed up and saying, you don't need stabilizing care. It is only your fetus who needs stabilizing care, and we aren't required to protect you under that. And so that's where this was. Yeah, there were a lot of pro-life amendments in the Reagan era, but this wasn't even that.
This was actually something that shouldn't be able to be used for that purpose now. And yet it's just being completely manipulated to create a freestanding right that does sort of
reek of personhood amendment issues. And what's ridiculous about it is that, you know, Justice Alito writes it as if we all have assumed that meaning of EMTALA for decades. And we all knew that there was this huge personhood part of EMTALA that meant that emergency care was not provided. No one thought that. No one believed that.
I don't know what was happening. It was Sam Alito's fever dreams. It was written under Roe. Yeah. Like, that's the bottom line. Like, it was written under Roe. So how can you, like, retrofit it to a post-Roe world? Yeah.
Yeah. And just to spell out the fetal personhood that we've been gesturing toward, like what Sam Alito basically says is this federal law and taller, at least the amendments to it that Chris just described, basically enact fetal personhood into the law and treat fetuses as people with rights co-equal to and in many respects, um, uh,
supreme to the rights of the pregnant person. And in addition to that, you know, the Alito dissent or whatever it is, which was joined by Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, in addition to going fetal personhood, also goes down what I have called Sam Alito at your cervix energy and offers like
his and Clarence and Neil's opinions on proper medical care for pregnant patients, where they say, well, actually, doctors, you might think abortions are required to teach PPROM, but let me tell you, maybe they're not. And it's like, OK, all of the pregnant people who are forced to become septic would like to disagree. But the opinion is just unhinged on that point. They're disagreeing.
Actual doctors also disagreeing. Hospitals, minds are turning and blowing right now. And I'll just note that there is a whole industry involved.
and the Christian right and on the conservative legal movement to manufacture this kind of faux medical expertise and this kind of faux science. We're seeing it in this case. We're seeing it in sort of cases around trans kids, around same-sex parenting. And so this is not coming out of thin air. This is supported by an entire sort of cottage industry of manufacturing faux advice that then these justices can sort of put on their official lab coats
and recite to us as if they are kind of co-equal or even better than what actual doctors are saying.
Dr. Sam, always there to help. This is why we need the political scientist on hand. And again, just to be clear what Sam Alito's opinion says, you know, Justice Kagan in her separate writing joined by Justice Sotomayor says, you know, his opinion merits a brief response. And she goes on to describe what he is saying. And she describes it as saying, Justice Alito's dissenting opinion is
Primary argument is that although EMTALA generally obligates hospitals to provide emergency medical care, it never demands that they offer an abortion no matter how much that procedure is needed to prevent grave physical harm or even death. Like that is the synopsis of his argument.
view. So we are running out of time on this emergency episode, but I want to give all of you an opportunity for kind of final thoughts that people should be taking away from this EMTALA disposition. I guess I would just reiterate, Leah, what you said about the spending clause and Robert's kind of
laying the groundwork and creating a roadmap for future plaintiffs to challenge EMTALA on spending clause grounds, because this is a page from the Roberts playbook. We've seen it before. We're going to acknowledge that Congress has this power, but we're going to create kind of artificial principles and rules that limit it.
in ways that are not found in the text structure or history of the Constitution. And so keep an eye out for that, because that would be a continuation of sort of a long-term Roberts Court trend of narrowing federal power in areas where the federal government clearly and emphatically has power. You know, I just, there's two things that I think are important to say. The first is, I do want to remind people, EMTALA still exists.
So I'm worried that there will be even more confusion. And so it still exists and hospitals still have to provide emergency care, including abortion care. And then the second thing I have to say is that this confusion and crisis is entirely of this court's making.
The court created the crisis in Dobbs. Then it created a new crisis when it took this case, it says, I guess, too soon and allowed the Idaho ban to be in there for so many months. And now they've created a new crisis and confusion because I do think hospitals are going to be more and more nervous about their obligations until it still exists. And so final word from me.
I would just allow somebody else's words to speak. Justice Jackson, along with Justice Sotomayor in another case today, read from her dissent on the bench. And I think that that was...
to echo a lot of what we've been saying today, that this does need to be highlighted. This does not resolve the issue. This is the court passing the buck. And she literally said it is delay. And I think that that is sort of the key takeaway and
And if I don't necessarily think that the decision today was one just based on politics, I do think that the reality of those three votes in the sort of concurrence that
My biggest fear from that is that, particularly from the Chief Justice, that he's sort of shown us this year what a lack of a spine he has. And I think in some ways, this was a warning of how important the election is and that he really could go as he thinks the country is going and will just...
craft a majority out of that. I'm going to take host privilege and add mine at the end, which is Justice Jackson's, you know, words, I think, underscore the cost of this decision. You know, she says and writes, quote, for as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho, Texas and elsewhere will be paying the price.
because we owe them and the nation an answer to the straightforward preemption question presented. I respectfully dissent. And also, I understand this as an effort like the medication abortion case to basically lower the salience of abortion in the upcoming election, when in reality, the two decisions are
only underscore that this next election is really going to decide a lot of significant issues related to the future of abortion access. Because in the event that Trump wins, even these limited, though important, EMTALA protections might disappear if his administration takes the position that EMTALA actually doesn't require the availability of emergency stabilizing care. And, you know, whether Trump or Biden wins, this issue and other abortion issues are going to make their way back to the courts. And, you know,
That is important enough, right, to keep in mind as you are preparing about what to do in the, you know, upcoming election cycle. So thank you, Fatima, for joining us for this segment on what I am sure is an extremely busy day for you. So glad to be here. Thank you.
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Now we are going to discuss the court's latest attacks on the administrative state, the agencies that are a part of governance today. The court released two different cases that embraced two different ways of challenging the administrative state as a treat. Basically, the court said, why not both? So the first one we're going to cover is
SEC versus Jarkesee. This was a six to three decision along typical ideological lines invalidating the SEC's civil enforcement scheme. That is, the court struck down the SEC's ability to impose civil penalties on companies that violate securities law in SEC enforcement proceedings. The chief justice wrote the opinion for the six Republican appointees, holding that this scheme violated the company's Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
And I guess before we get into dissecting the case, I wanted to clarify for our listeners why this is kind of a big deal and how it strips authority from the administrative state and transfers it to the federal courts. So I guess I'd turn that question over to both of you. Like, why is this case kind of a big deal as part of the larger, you know, attack on the administrative state?
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the first ways that I can share with you that we can tell that it's a big deal is that Justice Sotomayor read from her dissent. And that happens occasionally when justices want to make a point that basically it's the I strenuously object of the Supreme Court. Yeah.
But it's I mean, one thing about that, first of all, the Supreme Court doesn't live stream opinion announcements, which which they absolutely should. And there's no reason why they do not. But you, listener, will not be able to hear this live.
this audible dissent until next fall. But what we heard in the court today is sort of a signal that the liberal trio do see and want to make
these administrative cases be seen by the public as as important as the sort of social cases and voting rights cases that liberals normally think of as the big cases. Yeah, and I'll just add, I think
One of the kind of background principles to keep in mind here is that these separation of powers cases are not the sexy civil liberties cases. And yet they have such a fundamental impact on politics, on who gets to decide and who has authority. And so for me, this is one of these really sexy separation of powers cases where
That has huge consequences. And I agree with Chris. That's why Sotomayor reads her dissent from the bench. And when we get to it, that dissent is fire. Right. That dissent is the equivalent of Scalia's Morrison versus Olson back in the 80s. This wolf comes as a wolf. Right. So I think that is the stakes are so high. It's so technical. But that's how conservatives are sort of shielding these massive dissenters.
changes, seismic changes they're making to the separation of powers in this really highly technical separation of powers decisions. Maybe just like a beat on the potential fallout, you know, as Justice Sotomayor's dissent, which we'll obviously get to, you know, in a second. But as her dissent for the three Democratic appointees said, you know, there are something like two dozen agencies that use these kind of civil enforcement schemes that impose civil penalties in administrative proceedings.
like the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, the FCC, the FTC. Medicare enforcement also works this way. And the decision calls into question those enforcement schemes and potentially requires the agencies to go to federal court, which are slower, have backlogs, and are now staffed with anti-regulatory judges.
And I guess, you know, Amanda, I want to start with you on this question. We have talked so much on this podcast about the conservative legal movement's efforts to undermine and really challenge the administrative state. How should we understand, like, this case as a part of that strategy? Yeah. So this is this case. There was a question raised, which the court didn't address yesterday.
And I want to talk about that for a moment. So one of the ways in which the court really could have adjudicated this case, which is it would be under the non-delegation doctrine.
Right. So the idea that Congress can't delegate broad swaths of its own legislative power to administrative agencies absent some kind of rule, right, telling them how to govern. And this is a doctrine that goes back to before the 1930s, but was really used by the Hughes court to strike down several provisions of FDR's New Deal legislation.
So we're talking about making the Hughes court great again here. And one thing make the Great Depression great, make the Great Depression great again. Right. Make laissez faire capitalism great again. And for me, I was really surprised that we didn't get a concurrence from Thomas again.
about delegation, right? Saying, I hope some future court will be able to revisit the non-delegation doctrine. But the sneaky Roberts way is to have the same practical effect without raising the specter of those 1930s judicially activist cases that have now been kind of buried in the canon, right? We don't want to go back to there, except Thomas does. So for me, that I think is the interesting part here is that you have that savvy of John Roberts and
to achieve the same practical effect as reviving this like dusty non-delegation doctrine, except he doesn't have to revive the non-delegation doctrine to do it.
Chris, I had actually wanted to basically put that question to you, which is this opinion when I read it was just like, this is peak Roberts to me, insisting the court isn't overruling any cases while coming up with a pretty nonsensical way of reading the court's prior cases in order to turn the law in a completely different direction and accomplish the result that the conservative legal movement has pushing for. Like, am I off there? Or like, what was your reading of
that majority. You're not off. And I mean, it's almost even more than that. It's just this idea and Sotomayor does dig into it that there's just... We all talked back in 2022 about the fact that like the court doesn't care about stare decisis anymore and they're going to overturn anything that they want to because now they have the votes.
Today, what Sotomayor suggests and virtually says at one point is basically we've moved a step beyond that even. We don't even need to say when we're overruling precedent. And that's really important here because it's this 1977 case, Atlas Roofing, that it's
going in, everybody was like, well, that sort of controls that. That's that. And most important, particularly to Amanda's point about separation of powers, that's what Congress has been doing for the past since 1977. Every
law about a federal agency that has been passed since 1977 was built on not just Atlas Roofing, which is the other thing that the majority pretends like that's a standalone case, but
But everything is based on this idea since then that, yes, these are allowed. Yes, Congress, when they're passing an independent statutory right that an agency is going to enforce, they can do so with an administrative agency through an administrative process. And the...
misuse of other cases to sort of pick and choose parts of these couple of other earlier decisions to say, well, no, we've already limited Atlas because of this. And so what we're doing today isn't a surprise. It's
Like, as Sotomayor says, it's only not overturning precedent if you ignore the precedent. This is her quote. In a world where precedent means something, this should end the case. Yet here it does not. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. And just to take a beat on this Atlas Roofing point, you know, Chris said everyone understood that Atlas Roofing settled it. This was the oral argument where Justice Kagan had sent to the advocate, you know, no one since Atlas Roofing has had the chutzpah to come in here arguing that these agency enforcement proceedings are unconstitutional because what Atlas Roofing had done is uphold.
hold the EPA's civil enforcement mechanism for seeking civil penalties, which is what the agency did here. And yet the court says Atlas Roofing somehow doesn't control. And how the court gets there is this really confusing process where even though the court has blessed Congress assigning this authority to agencies,
The court now comes back and says, but actually it violates the Seventh Amendment because, you know, the penalties that the agency is seeking are all but dispositive. And, you know, just to kind of list the other cases that I had in mind when I said this was Pete Roberts, you know, all of the removal cases. Right. He doesn't say we're overruling Humphrey's executor. He just cabins it and goes in a completely different direction. Right.
or cases like Stern versus Marshall on the authority of bankruptcy courts. He just says, we're not overruling all those prior cases. I'm just distinguishing them in completely nonsensical ways. And I think you're both right that this is designed to kind of taint
take a lot of the steam out of the public perception of these cases because, one, they're not admitting to overruling them. And two, they're not invoking a doctrine that has now kind of bubbled up in the public discourse, non-delegation, where people understand like, oh, wow, that would be a big deal and a dramatic refashioning of how American government works. So I guess, you know,
I want to put the question to both of you, like, what else should we kind of know either about the majority opinion or the Justice Sotomayor dissent that we have now alluded to several times?
Yeah, I'll just say, you know, some of the notable quotables from the Sotomayor opinion, you know, the phrase bench slapping, right, comes to mind. So I think she's got a lot of good bench slaps in here. Number one, she cites the Harvard Law Review piece from Will Bode, which was a Roberts clerk to support the dissent's reading in this case. She talks about the umpire.
Right. Metaphor. She deploys that against Roberts and more recently Kavanaugh. This is not the court acting like an umpire. She even busts out solicitor general Robert Bork, the patron father saint of the conservative legal movement to say even
Even he wouldn't sign on to this crap, right? Even he was defending Atlas Roofing, right? Like he filed the brief there. I think it is the Atlas Roofing. Yeah, it's specifically, it's like this precedent that you're calling the high watermark that you're just completely ignoring. That's Bork's precedent. Now Robert Bork is too much of a rhino for this Supreme Court. That is where we are. That liberal Robert Bork. Yes.
Thank God. Thank God we got the conservative majority in here. And Rex Lee. And Rex Lee. Yeah. Other notable liberal switch. I mean, today's decision is a power grab. Sotomayor writes, which is really a callback to that Scalia dissent, Morrison versus Olson. She busts out Madison's Federalist 51. She's like,
Oh, this is y'all's favorite quote about the separation of powers. Let me show you how you are now violating it. And so for me, it doesn't surprise me she read this from the bench because this is a case that, as we say in political science, would go below the radar. Right. This isn't one of these cases that's going to achieve a lot of salience. But using that tool, reading it from the bench ensures that people are going to pay attention. Right. Right.
I do think you talked about how it's a quintessential Roberts opinion. I do think an example of that is the fact that as Amanda was talking about what they didn't resolve, that he sort of highlights that like,
It's sort of like, oh, we could have done so much more. Look at how demure we are. He's like, since the answer to the jury trial question resolves this case, we do not reach the non-delegation or removal issues.
I mean, it's just, it's, I mean, it goes back to this point that I made at the beginning of the year that I do think strict scrutiny listeners are going to be particularly attuned to is this idea that like the Fifth Circuit is actually a great tool for the Roberts court because they're able to swat down three of every four decisions, but they're
the reality is that none of them are reasonable. If you have four unreasonable decisions out of the Fifth Circuit and one becomes U.S. Supreme Court law, that's still bad. That's still a, a, a,
further right-wing encapsulation and capture of the courts. And that sort of, I mean, listening to yesterday's podcast about Murthy, like, yeah, they slapped down the Fifth Circuit, but they had this waiting in the wings where they blessed another Fifth Circuit ruling. The other thing that I would say that this...
This opinion and the fact that Roberts wrote it and the fact that Sotomayor read the dissent from the bench really just highlights how much we have to be on guard for Loper, Bright and Relentless. Like, clearly they're going to be bad if.
if she was giving the heads up with, I mean, we did not expect a bench dissent from Jarcosy. So Loperbright and Relentless are, of course, the Chevron cases where people have asked the court to overrule those. So just to wrap up,
up kind of the discussion on jargony. You know, Chris, you alluded to the fact that everything that comes out of the Fifth Circuit is kind of a mess. You know, this is one of the decisions that came out of the Fifth Circuit. And here the Fifth Circuit got way ahead of the Supreme Court and effectively said, you know, we're just going to ignore this precedent, Atlas Roofing, you don't like. And the Supreme Court basically said, yeah, great job, guys. Right. And so, you know, even if, as you're saying, like they slap them down in some cases, they're not actually policing them because they're letting them get away with it and many others.
And I, again, just kind of wanted to underscore that this case, it's a little bit more difficult to spin out the precise practical implications, but this is going to have like deregulatory effects because it's raising the costs for agencies to try to enforce the law against companies and corporations. And so that is going to mean, right, it's harder, right, to hold these companies and corporations accountable in federal court. And the chief justice, I think, really
wrote this opinion in a way that is pretty broad and opens up avenues for challenging other agencies' enforcement schemes as well. Oh, absolutely. But as we noted up top, one blow to the administrative state just isn't enough because in a separate case, the court opened up yet another avenue for challenging administrative agencies' decisions by adopting a pretty demanding standard for how agencies must justify or explain their decisions.
And this is the Ohio versus EPA case about the federal government's good neighbor rule that limited emissions from upwind states. So to minimize pollution in downwind states, just to briefly recap,
complicated procedural posture, the Biden administration adopted a federal standard for emissions at the same time that it was reviewing the state's plans for limiting emissions. And the federal government then rejected some of the state's plans. States challenged the EPA's rejection of their plans and some federal courts invalidated the EPA's rejection of some state plans.
Then the states came back and said the entire federal plan is invalid because it didn't take account of the possibility that not all of the projected upwind states would be subject to the federal plan since the states that successfully challenged the EPA's rejection of their plans wouldn't be subject to the federal plan. Anyways, that's a procedural posture. So in a 5-4 decision...
by none other than Ann Gorsuch Burford's son, Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court agreed with them, staying the enforcement of the EPA's good neighbor rule before it goes into effect and while it is being challenged. Basically, have fun breathing particulate matter, you hippies. So, Chris, do you want to explain kind of how the majority got there to stay this rule?
I mean, the bottom line that I think is so disingenuous, I know Neil Gorsuch, a disingenuous opinion that is shocking to everybody. But it's on page 17 of his opinion when he delves into the dissent's arguments, right?
after he dismisses the government's arguments under the APA. He says, the dissent advances other theories of its own. It begins by suggesting that the problem the applicants raised was not, quote, important enough to warrant a reasoned reply from the agency. That is the wildest thing that I've seen in an attack on Congress
Well, in this case, Justice Barrett. That raging liberal Amy Cohn Barrett. So by another Republican appointee. If you turn to page 12 of Barrett's dissent, you learn, if you weren't already familiar with it, that that was a quote from State Farm. The...
Essential understanding of how APA challenges are considered under the APA. In order for an agency's response to be arbitrary and capricious, you have to find that the agency in quote,
from the opinion entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem. So the entire Supreme Court decision from Gorsuch is built on this quicksand that literally now anything
that a challenger to a regulation can point to as not being appropriately responded to by the agency is a justification to toss the regulation out or at least get it put on hold pending litigation. And that just, to me, that is both the entire basis of the decision and the most disingenuous aspect of it. Yeah.
Amanda, I kind of wanted to put the question that you alluded to when talking about, you know, jargsy back to you about this case, which is Justice Sotomayor in jargsy called the Supreme Court's decision a power grab. Right. In a significant separation of powers case, the court basically reallocates decision making authority among the different branches. So, like, how does this case kind of fit into, you know, the Roberts Court continued power grab and in particular, like undermining federal agencies vis-a-vis the federal court?
Yeah, so for me, I read this as a...
almost like a Shelby County versus Holder. Whereas we don't recognize that data or that expertise because we don't understand it. And you didn't do a good enough job explaining it to us. And Neil Gorsuch's opinion to me is like, Neil, I hate the administrative state. Gorsuch turns into Neil Gorsuch, the science guy, where at one point he's like, ozone kids is bad. Sometimes ozone can have these harmful effects.
And, you know, but and yet when the EPA did its due diligence, they didn't explain enough or they didn't do the right process. And so it has this effect of rejecting all that expertise, which when you read Barrett's dissent really comes to light. Right. And Barrett's saying the majority just ignores the fact that the EPA actually did provide the
the right kind of evidence. And they did do the due diligence. They just didn't explain it well enough in a particular point in time. And so for me, it really is this disingenuous kind of rejection of agency authority of saying, you have to just have to do better, right? You have to do better if you're going to justify these administrative rulings.
Yeah, it has very strong Lucille, I don't understand the question and therefore won't respond to it, Bluth energy and kind of nitpicking the EPA's decisions. I guess I kind of wanted to flag two different ways I understood the decision as arrogating power to the courts and get your reaction on this. You know, one is this case came to the court on a stay application, you know, a request to pause a rule before it goes into effect.
And traditionally, when deciding whether to grant a stay, the court considers not just the underlying merits, that is, whether the rule is invalid, but also, right, the balance of the equities, right, and the likelihood of irreparable harm. And here, Justice Gorsuch's opinion draws on this line of questioning from Justice Kavanaugh from oral argument where they basically say, like, eh,
Both sides say they're harmed. So what's the big deal? We're not even going to attempt to weigh this. And because therefore, like, we think the rule is invalid, we can just stay it. And so I think that that is a way of saying, well, look, we federal courts just get to superintend what agencies are doing and we don't actually have to assess, you know, the balance of the
of our decision in doing so. And then second is, and I think this is just another way of thinking about, Amanda, what you were saying, and this also draws from, you know, Chris, you were saying the opinion is disingenuous. The court is really nitpicking what the EPA says
And it is reading, I think, disingenuously and too broadly the comments that were submitted to the EPA, right, in saying, well, this challenge was raised to the EPA. And yet the court refuses, right, to also interpret broadly and I think interpret fairly this.
what the federal government had done and said in this case, because none of what the federal government did or said, as Justice Barrett lays out perfectly clearly, depended on the number of states that were actually subject to this plan. It was instead dependent on other considerations, like the cost effectiveness thresholds and emissions reduction technology. And so, you know,
Those two pieces, I think, are a real green light to the federal courts that say you can be a roving commission for any regulations you think are invalid. And second, in deciding what regulations you think are invalid, like, go ahead, right? Treat the record unfairly, give the challengers all the benefit of the doubt, and then nitpick the federal government and, you know, not kind of take seriously what they were doing or saying.
Yeah. And now that's exactly it, Leah. And one of the things that I keep coming back to as I'm reading this this court's decisions is is this idea of judicial restraint versus judicial activism. So way back in the 80s.
All right. The court was on this hobby horse of judicial restraint. Right. Courts, judges are unelected. They if there's a way to construe a statute or a rule that would uphold or maintain the product of democracy of the people, then we as judges have a responsibility to read the rule or statute or constitution that way.
Right. We defer to the political process and only when it is absolutely necessary do we intervene. Not because we think a rule is the best rule or we think a law is the best law, but because it is reasonable. It is constitutional. It is legitimate. And these cases, to me, are the conservative majority finding ways, as you said, Leah, to nitpick and to tear down and to reverse the
Agency rulings, expertise, and even congressional statutes, readings of congressional statutes. So I think it all feeds back into that broader agenda of, as Sotomayor said, arrogating power back to the court and letting them be the last say. I do think two things that...
responding to your comments, as you said, that sort of came into my mind was that looking at the preliminary injunction factors, I mean, obviously, likelihood of success has regularly taken the fore. But I've noticed, and I think we saw in the Idaho trans care case, that sort of the hardship factor sort of being almost...
if not disingenuous, at least like punted to the side in those cases, because it seems to me that there, it would clearly favor the challengers when we're talking about a new law that would restrict ability to receive care that they previously were able to receive, and yet it was considered irrelevant.
And then the other point is that I do think this idea of comments in rulemaking forming the basis is – I can't quite come up with the analogy, but it's like – it's that like – it's like – this is what it is. It's when somebody quotes a tweet –
and says, there are people saying that. Many people are saying. Many people are saying. There are 3,000 comments that were submitted. Yes, one of them did raise that issue, Neil. Does that mean that the agency needs to respond to, again, once we've removed important from the factor, does that mean that the agencies now need to respond to,
to every statement implied, because this is the other issue, is that it wasn't even an issue raised by the states in their criticism. It was implied by their complaint. And it just, it really is, we're starting to see this comment issue coming up. And I think speaking of the shadow docket and speaking of stays,
in the Title IX challenges, the challenges to the Biden administration's Title IX rules. And I forget which one of the district court decisions, I think it might've been Doty in Louisiana. His decision relied on, actually did quote from like, in a comment submitted to the agency, they were told of concerns about this aspect of the rule. Yeah.
And I just kind of want to explain for our listeners who might not be super immersed in administrative procedure, like what the comment issue kind of is and how it arises. So in these arbitrary and capricious challenges, you know, when an agency is thinking about a rule, they will send out a notice of proposed rulemaking. People can then submit comments.
and then the agency will publish a final rule and, you know, responding to comments. But as Chris was saying, you know, generally they only have to respond to important or material comments. And generally you can only challenge a rule, right, on the basis of comments that were actually presented to the agency. And I think, you know, part of the oddity of this
case is it was just a really weird ground to stay a rule and prevent it from going into effect that an agency hadn't responded to a comment, in part because the comment, you know, it's not clear to raise the issue. It's also not clear how material it was, like, to the ultimate rule. And also, the agency had a motion for reconsideration in which this specific issue was raised, and the agency expressed
And yet, you know, that doesn't seem to matter either. And this is just another way in which, again, the court seems to be inviting, you know, future judicial challenges to agencies. Yeah.
So, you know, we've alluded to the Barrett dissent. She wrote the dissent that was joined by the three Democratic appointees. You know, anything kind of of note about that dissent that we should be aware of?
Just to point out for readers who want to look, the part of Barrett actually quotes from the comment on page 10 of her dissent. And she says, this sentence says nothing about what would be required if after the EPA finalizes its disapprovals and issues a final rule, some states drop out of the plan.
And so it was it's not only that they've gotten rid of the important language, but even the comment that they use doesn't doesn't really say what what Gorsuch was saying. Yeah. And I'll just say in the final paragraph of Her Descent, this is where I really see a contrast between Neil Gorsuch is like fourth grade science view and Amy Coney Barrett saying these are really thorny technical ideas.
issues. And she says, our emergency docket requires us to evaluate quickly the merits of applications without the benefit of full briefing and reasoned lower court opinions. Given those limitations, we, and here is an actual statement of judicial restraint, should proceed all the more cautiously in cases like this one with voluminous technical records and thorny legal questions. I respectfully dissent that Neil, the science guy Gorsuch can...
really understand what's going on here. Yeah. And Neil's like, no, I got this one. I got it. I am the ozone specialist. Matthew Kazmirich thought he was chief scientist. He's got nothing on me. That's right. I would note a concern that
that I guess is not a new concern, but just that, that this does raise is, um, to the extent there was any sort of pairing of Barrett and Kavanaugh on, uh, being, uh, uh,
Judicially restrained when it comes to stay applications and shadow docket requests, as Amanda was discussing. He was the vote that mattered here. Had he adhered to that principles, Barrett would have been writing the majority. Yep.
Okay, so finally, we're just going to briefly note we got the opinion in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma. This ended up being a 5-4 opinion with Justice Gorsuch writing the majority. It was somewhat of an odd lineup. And the majority opinion ultimately invalidated the settlement in the opioid case.
And it concluded that the bankruptcy code does not authorize settlements that include the release of claims against non-parties, here the Sacklers. So recall that in this case, the Sacklers are alleged to have drained the company's assets and to essentially be holding any settlement deal hostage until they are released from individual liabilities.
The dissent by Justice Kavanaugh, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Sotomayor and Kagan, focuses on how this settlement might be the best option for opioid victims and how the settlement was supported by many, including all 50 state attorneys general. But the majority concludes this just isn't an authority that bankruptcy courts have under the bankruptcy code.
Yeah. And just note, this is another curious coalition in terms of the breakdown. If Justice Jackson had signed on with the other liberals, then the dissent becomes the majority in this case. So we see another interesting majority and dissent coalition happening in this case.
I thought that this was an interesting decision because as opposed to the EPA decision where it was pretty clear that it was sort of like, I want pollution versus I don't. This was a dissent where you did see both sides saying, I am trying to...
My opinion believes that it is advancing the cause of protecting and supporting those people who were wronged by this, which is interesting. Like, sort of like everybody was like, no, we know these were bad people who did a bad thing. And we're basically now left with a bad situation.
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That is all we have time for on this emergency same day episode. Thank you so much, Amanda and Chris, for joining me as guest hosts. I want to put in two quick reminders. One, if you are not subscribed to Lawdork, you are missing out on great real time in-depth coverage of the courts. Chris literally broke the story about Justice Alito selling his Bud Light stock.
As part of that culture war fight, he is the one on top of the sanction proceedings against the LGBT civil rights lawyers and more. And if you are not following Amanda and if you haven't checked out Ideas with Consequences and Separate but Faithful, you are missing out on understanding, you know, the development of these cottage industries and legal theories and different organizations that are changing the law. These are the mechanisms by which law is changing and how. So thank you so much to the two of you for making time to join.
Thanks, Leah. Thank you.
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