The Mets came back and played competitively against two good teams. A misplayed ball by Baty, who shouldn't have been playing the outfield, was a major reason why they didn't win both series.
Order List
Oh. This is supposed to be about the Supreme Court. Well, the week was somewhat bland.
The big news was that they granted cert in a case involving the Excessive Fines Clause. It is somewhat unclear why it did so now, but it isn't shocking or anything. They, for whatever reason, got it over with.
The first scheduled summer order list was otherwise, as usual, basically a housekeeping matter. As noted here, did provide a way to finalize some things sooner rather than later. Nothing special, though.
The cert grant had a catchy hook about someone's plane being seized for illegally transporting a "six pack of beer" to a dry town in Alaska. That is more sloganeering than the full story. There was much more beer involved.
OTOH, along with them taking the case when the lower court ruled against the defendant, it might have been a sign of what is to come.
Kagan Spins
Justice Kagan, during her joint testimony with Barrett, pushed against the "shadow docket" label since they have been doing a better job at transparency.
It is a work in progress. It was as much spin as truth.
I re-read Steve Vladeck's book on the subject. He's writing a new one on judicial reform. A new edition of The Shadow Docket would have a new introduction, which would show that there are a lot of shadows remaining. Sorry, William Baude.*
She also told the Ninth Circuit, where she's the circuit justice, that the Supreme Court is not a "rubber stamp" for Trump. Hey, look at the tariffs and birthright citizenship decisions!
Kagan has to work with these people. She is trying to win as much as she can. She can't say they are just a rubber stamp. They acted like one regularly, though.
Upcoming
There are two more scheduled summer order lists. Two executions are likely next week.
The Nixon Tapes case was handed down fifty-two years ago. Nixon resigned soon afterwards.
Wasn't that fun?
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Shadow Docket: Let's do a bit of a deep dive here on this issue. The "shadow docket" is, as Steve Vladeck notes in his book, a collection of things.
It would include the choices made in the Order List, such as choosing this specific Eighth Amendment case over numerous others involving a person serving a long prison sentence.
The shadow docket is not just the "emergency docket," though final death penalty appeals both fit that bill and underline that the term still fits. If anything, we have less transparency; Sotomayor, for instance, provides fewer statements in such cases.
Baude (and the new SCOTUSBlog) wants to use "the Interim Docket," which is bullshit.
As Vladeck and others note regularly, the things decided there are effectively final. We saw that with a lot of the Trump administrative state destruction.
Baude (see the link in the main discussion) is upset—is he afraid of Alito? -- that the term sounds "nefarious." Also, we see what they do (often digging deep on the docket pages, not linked to the main orders, where their bare decisions are noted), so it is not really "hard to see."
Again, that is bullshit. We do not know a lot about their decision-making. They still largely work in the shadows, including decision-making (this is cited in the book) by not posting transcripts on the website.
Ginsburg did so. Kagan, after defending her colleagues for being more transparent, did not.
ETA: Thomas Goldstein, previously of SCOTUSBlog, has been sentenced. Sounds like a prime candidate for a Trump pardon.
