This op-ed was posted in The Hill on September 6, 2021.
If there was any doubt about the growing menace of the federal courts’ “shadow docket,” the Supreme Court’s disastrous and opaque ruling allowing an unconstitutional abortion ban to go forward in Texas has erased it. This shadow docket system has become the modern equivalent of the smoke-filled room, where decisions with far-reaching consequences are made in secret and without accountability.
This is not how the court system, or democracy, is supposed to work.