Justice Sotomayor complains about Trump's Emergency Appeals

Sotomayor calls Trump administration's emergency Supreme Court appeals 'unprecedented'

but the Court keeps siding with the White House

Justice Sonia Sotomayor used a speech at the University of Alabama School of Law on Thursday to criticize the Trump administration's use of the Supreme Court's emergency docket, calling the volume of appeals "unprecedented in the court's history."

What she did not dwell on is the obvious corollary: the Court's conservative majority has agreed with the administration in case after case, repeatedly lifting lower-court orders that sought to block the president's agenda.

The remarks, reported by The Hill, amount to the latest public airing of frustration from one of the Court's three liberal justices over a process that has consistently produced results she opposes.

Since President Trump retook the White House, the administration has filed 34 emergency applications, appeals that ask the justices to intervene quickly in cases still working through lower courts. The Supreme Court has sided with the administration in a vast majority of those cases.

That track record is the real story Sotomayor's complaint obscures.

The administration has said the appeals are a direct response to federal district judges overstepping their authority to halt the president's policies. That framing matters. When a single district judge issues a nationwide injunction freezing an executive action, the administration's only fast remedy is to ask the Supreme Court to step in.

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