Dahlia Lithwick puzzles over the recent spate of high-impact SCOTUS decisions that came in the form of injunctions and cert denials. She looks to explain why “unsigned, unexplained reasoning is the new black”:
Between the state legislatures getting way out in front [o]f the court’s doctrine on voting rights and abortion, and the court’s decision to hang back and wait for conflicting decisions from different circuit courts in the marriage equality cases, what we seem to be witnessing is a Supreme Court that is dealing with events moving at lightening speeds. It may be attempting to impose what [former acting solicitor general Walter] Dellinger describes as “procedural dignity” upon the process. Even when the court issues late-night stays and unsigned orders, the court is clarifying that it gets the last word, even when the last word is haughty silence.
Thus, in the voting rights context, the court is merely ensuring that states do not put new systems in place immediately prior to the midterm elections. In the marriage equality context, the court is simply affording the states the opportunity to arrive at the correct conclusions on their own schedules.
And in the Texas abortion context, the court is reacting to a set of Texas regulations that appear to completely reinterpret (if not blatantly disregard) the rule announced by the court itself in its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. As Greenhouse notes, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals more or less ignored Casey when it ruled on the Texas abortion regulations: “In holding that the forced closing of every abortion clinic south and west of San Antonio, requiring women to travel hundreds of miles to exercise their constitutional right, was not an undue burden in purpose or effect, the Fifth Circuit ruled in blatant disregard of the Casey standard.” Really, was the court going to permit that to happen? When the court bats these issues away, it’s merely saying that nobody rushes the highest court in the land. Not even Texas.
The Dish 