256. So Unexplained: Justice Alito’s Non-Responsive Emergency Docket Defense

Steve Vladeck · 6 Oct 2026

Steve Vladeck did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The Supreme Court's emergency docket behavior appears to be motivated more by the political preferences of a majority of the justices than by the faithful application of neutral legal principles.

Their wordsthe Court was also behaving inconsistently, so that it appeared that its rulings were motivated more by the political preferences of a majority of the justices than by the faithful application of neutral legal principles.
Our reading
The proliferation of thinly explained precedential rulings in high-profile cases makes it harder for the Court to earn diffuse public acceptance that its rulings are principled.

Their wordsfor a Court whose authority depends on diffuse public acceptance that its rulings are principled (if not of the principles themselves), the proliferation of thinly explained precedential rulings in high-profile cases has made it that much harder for that support to be earned.

Keep reading

The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.