Jodi Kantor

Thanks for having me, Tim.

I'm glad to give you the excuse.

Sure.

So what's really unusual about this story is that Adam Liptak and I obtained 16 pages of the justices' private correspondence, like not something like the Dobbs leak, which was an opinion that was meant to eventually become public.

This is stuff that we weren't supposed to see for generations.

And we published this in The New York Times.

And it's a momentous set of papers because it allows us to see the kind of pivotal moment when the shadow docket was born.

I mean, it evolved over many years, but this was a signal moment because it happened during the Obama years.

It was a 2016 case.

The court halted President Obama's case.

Signature climate initiative, and they leaped in front of the D.C.

Circuit, which was supposed to hear the case.

And so what you get to see in these papers is the justices behind the scenes kind of backing their way into a new way of doing justice.

business.

They're having an argument about whether it's okay for the court to do this or not.

And the Democratic appointees very much object to it.

They're very concerned.

The Republican appointees want to go ahead.

And the chief justice is really the person who leaps out from the memos and is the sort of most indelible character in the drama.

Yeah, absolutely.