The Supreme Court’s emergency order blocking former President Barack Obama’s signature Clean Power Initiative in 2016 followed a series of internal memos among the justices that revealed a battle along ideological lines over whether to intervene.
In a rare glimpse into internal high court memos obtained by The New York Times, Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by former President George W. Bush, urged the Supreme Court to block Obama’s effort, while liberal justices pushed back.
Roberts and conservatives on the court were concerned not only with Obama’s policy, but with the potential for the Clean Power Plan to reshape the power sector before the justices could fully review whether it was legal, new disclosure memos show.
Roberts wrote in one of the memos published by the New York Times on Friday, “Absent the circumstances, the Clean Power Plan would (and will) cause a substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic energy sector before this court has had an opportunity to review its legality.”
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Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts attends President Donald Trump’s remarks at the US Capitol
(Getty Images)
Fox News Digital reached out to the Supreme Court’s communications team on Monday for comment on the leak.
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Roberts’ push came as the justices considered an unusual request in the emergency docket, sometimes called the “shadow docket,” from red states and outside groups to block the Obama-era rule, which was aimed at cutting carbon emissions over the next 25 years.
An emergency docket allows litigants to bypass normal court proceedings and seek immediate relief from the Supreme Court if lower courts block them through injunctions or preliminary injunctions.
The Clean Power Plan included the Obama Environmental Protection Agency regulating coal, oil and gas plants under the Clean Air Act. Roberts wrote that without the Supreme Court’s entry, “both the state and private industry will suffer irreparable harm and are—in my opinion—very likely to survive.”
In another memo, Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, dissented, saying, “The unique nature of the relief sought in these applications gives me real pause.”
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Former President Barack Obama at a campaign event on Saturday, November 1, 2025.
Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, circulated a memo the same day as Kagan in which he agreed with Roberts.
“Failure to uphold this rule threatens to render our ability to provide meaningful judicial review — and by extension, our institutional legitimacy — a vacuum,” Alito wrote.
Within days, the justices temporarily blocked Obama’s Clean Power Plan 5-4 along ideological lines, effectively dealing it a death blow because Democrats would lose the White House later that year. The New York Times noted that the Obama White House at the time dismissed the decision as a minor setback but that “behind closed doors, officials were surprised that the court intervened so quickly.”
The back-and-forth in the memos during the brief period from late January 2016 to February 9, when the summary judgment was issued, shows how quickly the justices moved to weigh in on the major president’s actions.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote in an op-ed that the anonymous leak of memos to the New York Times, the second leak of classified material since the Dobbs Opinion leak in 2022, “was clearly designed to injure some of its members.”
“For an institution that prides itself on its privacy and insecurity, the court seems increasingly porous and partisan in these leaks,” Turley wrote.
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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks at the 2025 Supreme Court Fellows Program, February 13, 2025, at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
A New York Times report highlighted that legal experts have long viewed the Clean Power Plan decision as the first example of the Supreme Court using the emergency docket in a way that limits executive power over national policy.
Judge Katenaji Brown Jackson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, was one of the most vocal dissenters on emergency cases during President Donald Trump’s second term as president, repeatedly benefiting from a fast-track docket. Jackson is sometimes joined in his dissent by two of his more liberal colleagues, Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and emergency cases are often split 6-3 in Trump’s favor.
Last week, Jackson aired her grievances in a different forum, blasting emergency docket decisions during a speech at Yale Law School as “scratch-paper musings” that undermine the high court’s purpose.
“Given the real-world facts that the peremptory requests ask the court to consider, the court’s deferral decisions can sometimes be completely irrational,” Jackson said. “We cannot expect the public to trust our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we continually greenlight harmful actions.”
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Legal experts have attributed the increased activity on the emergency docket to an increase in presidents seeking to shape national policy through executive orders.
“[An increase in emergency motions] The rise of executive orders and other forms of unilateral executive action really coincides with the disappearance of Congress as the primary form of lawmaking in our country, and that poses a huge challenge to the courts,” advocate Kannan Shanmugam told the Federal Society Panel last fall.
Fox News Digital reached out to Obama’s office for comment.
Original article source: Leaked memos reveal how the Supreme Court steamrolled Obama’s climate plan in a 2016 showdown
