Sotomayor Blames Colleagues For Slew Of Supreme Court Emergency Appeals

The Supreme Court has itself to blame for the flood of emergency appeals it’s now receiving, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday.

“We’ve done it to ourselves,” Sotomayor said during an appearance at the University of Alabama Law School. “The newspapers are filled with reports about how many emergency motions we are receiving. It's unprecedented in the court's history.”

The Trump administration has filed about 30 emergency applications with the Supreme Court over the past 15 months, winning more than 80 percent of them. Many of those decisions split the court, 6-3, along ideological lines.

Sotomayor attributed the administration victories to what she called a new presumption by several of her colleagues that any time federal government policies are halted, that generates the kind of irreparable harm that justifies the high court stepping in.

“There's a disagreement among us right now,” the Barack Obama appointee said. “There are members of my court … who believe that when Congress passes a law, it causes Congress and the people irreparable harm to have that law ignored … It has changed the paradigm on the court.”

Sotomayor struck a similar theme in a dissent last year, after the court green-lighted a Trump administration policy stepping up deportation of immigrants to countries where they lack any ties.

“Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial,” she wrote.

Critics have faulted the high court for resolving too many weighty disputes on its emergency or “shadow” docket, often with little or no explanation from the majority for its rulings.

Trump administration officials say the slew of Supreme Court emergency appeals was driven by an unprecedented number of injunctions against administration policies.