Chief Justice John Roberts is a fan of the Supreme Court’s long summer recess. After the sharp divisions and biting dissents that always emerge at the end of the term in late June or early July, he has said, the justices need some time to cool down before they return to the bench. "We do need a little break from each other," he said last year in Buffalo. That break is vanishing as emergency applications have started to dominate the court’s docket.
The Trump administration filed its 41st emergency application earlier this week. That matched the number of such applications filed over the entirety of the president’s first term, which was itself unprecedented, according to a tally kept by Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown. The fire hose of applications did not pause for the court’s summer recess. In just the past month or so, the court has twice weighed in on a Trump plan to curtail voting by mail, cleared the way for his White House ballroom, let him deport migrants to distant countries with which they had no connection and allowed his administration to use an expansive online system to let states hunt for ineligible voters.
"The rise of the emergency," said Justice Neil Gorsuch at a judicial conference in Colorado Springs. "The perpetual emergency. Everything is an emergency." The number of emergency applications has been ticking up over recent years. "Our summers used to actually be summers," said Justice Elena Kagan at a judicial conference in 2024. "It was one of the great things about our calendar is that it was spaced out so that we would have a break before we went back to the hothouse of decision-making."
"There used to be a time when we had a good chunk of a summer break," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California, Berkeley, that same year. "Not anymore. The emergency calendar is busy almost on a weekly basis. I’m working harder than I ever have. And to be almost 70 years old, this isn’t what I expected."
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing