US Supreme Court Keeps Ruling in Favor of Trump, But Doesn't Say Why

Issuing orders with little or no explanation exposes the court to suspicion, criticism

- Adam Liptak

WASHINGTON - In clearing the way for President Donald Trump's efforts to transform American government, the Supreme Court has issued a series of orders that often lacked a fundamental characteristic of most judicial work: an explanation of the court's rationale.

On July 14, for instance, in letting Mr. Trump dismantle the Education Department, the majority's unsigned order was a single four-sentence paragraph entirely devoted to the procedural mechanics of pausing a lower court's ruling.

What the order did not include was any explanation of why the court had ruled as it did. It was an exercise of power, not reason.

The silence was even more striking in the face of a 19-page dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

"The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive," Justice Sotomayor wrote. "But either way, the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave."

The question of whether the nation's highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the "emergency docket," which uses truncated procedures to produce terse provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case.

The court has allowed the administration to fire tens of thousands of government workers, discharge transgender troops, end protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from war-torn countries and fundamentally shift power from Congress to the president — often with scant or no explanation of how it arrived at those results.